Part I The watchful eye
The N.S.A., or National Security Agency, is a United States federal authority that reports to the Department of Defense. The head office is in Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Patuxent Freeway.
Since its foundation in 1952, the N.S.A. has been engaged in signals surveillance — these days mostly in connection with Internet and telephone traffic. Time after time its powers have been increased, and now it monitors more than twenty billion conversations and messages every twenty-four hours.
Chapter 1
Frans Balder always thought of himself as a lousy father.
He had hardly attempted to shoulder the role of father before and he did not feel comfortable with the task now that his son was eight. But it was his duty, that was how he saw it. The boy was having a rough time living with his ex-wife and her bloody partner, Lasse Westman.
So Balder had given up his job in Silicon Valley, got on a plane home and was now standing at Arlanda airport, almost in shock, waiting for a taxi. The weather was hellish. Rain whipped into his face and for the hundredth time he wondered if he was doing the right thing.
That he of all self-centred idiots should become a full-time father, how crazy an idea was that? He might as well have got a job at the zoo. He knew nothing about children and not much about life in general. The strangest thing of all was nobody had asked him to do it. No mother or grandmother had called him, pleading and telling him to face up to his responsibilities.
It was his own decision. He was proposing to defy a long-standing custody ruling and, without warning, walk into his ex-wife’s place and bring home his boy, August. No doubt all hell would break loose. That bloody Lasse Westman would probably give him a real beating. But he put that out of his mind and got into a taxi with a woman driver who was dementedly chewing gum and at the same time trying to strike up a conversation with him. She would not have succeeded even on one of his better days. Balder was not one for small talk.
He sat there in the back seat thinking about his son and everything that had happened recently. August was not the only — or even the main — reason why he had stopped working at Solifon. His life was in turmoil and for a moment he wondered if he really knew what he was getting himself into. As the taxi came into the Vasastan neighbourhood it felt as if all the blood was draining from his body. But there was no turning back now.
He paid the taxi on Torsgatan and took out his luggage, leaving it just inside the building’s front entrance. The only thing he took with him up the stairs was an empty suitcase covered with a brightly coloured map of the world, which he had bought at San Francisco International. He stood outside the apartment door, panting. With his eyes closed he imagined all the possible scenarios of fighting and screaming, and actually, he thought, you could hardly blame them. Nobody just turns up and snatches a child from his home, least of all a father whose only previous involvement has consisted of depositing money into a bank account. But this was an emergency, so he steeled himself and rang the doorbell, fighting off the urge to run away.
At first there was no answer. Then the door flew open and there was Westman with his piercing blue eyes and massive chest and enormous fists. He seemed built to hurt people, which was why he so often got to play the bad guy on screen, even if none of his roles — Balder was convinced of this — was as evil as the person he played in real life.
“Christ,” Westman said. “Look what we have here. The genius himself has come to visit.”
“I’m here to fetch August,” Balder said.
“You what?”
“I’m taking him with me, Lasse.”
“You must be joking.”
“I’ve never been more serious,” he tried, and then Hanna appeared from a room across to the left. True, she was not as beautiful as she had once been. There had been too much unhappiness for that and probably too many cigarettes and too much drink as well. But still he felt an unexpected wave of affection, especially when he noticed a bruise on her throat. She seemed to want to say something welcoming, even under the circumstances, but she never had time to open her mouth.
“Why should you care all of a sudden?” Westman said.
“Because August has been through enough. He needs a stable home.”
“And you think that you can provide that, you freak? Since when have you done anything except stare at a computer screen?”
“I’ve changed,” he said, feeling pathetic, in part because he doubted that he had changed one little bit.
A shiver ran through him as Westman came towards him with his mighty bulk and his pent-up rage. It was crushingly clear that he would have no means of resistance if that madman let fly. The whole idea had been insane from the start. But the strange thing was that there was no outburst, no scene, just a grim smile and then the words, “Well, isn’t that just great!”
“What do you mean?”
“That it’s about time, isn’t it, Hanna? Finally some sense of responsibility from Mr Busy. Bravo, bravo!” Westman clapped his hands theatrically. Afterwards that is what Balder found the most frightening — how easily they let the boy go.
Perhaps they saw August only as a burden. It was hard to tell. Hanna shot Balder some glances which were difficult to read and her hands shook and her jaw was clenched. But she asked too few questions. She should really have been cross-examining him, making thousands of demands, warning him and worrying that the boy’s routine would be upset. But all she said was:
“Are you sure about this? Will you manage?”
“I’m sure,” he said. Then they went to August’s room. Balder had not seen him for more than a year and he felt ashamed. How could he have abandoned such a boy? He was so beautiful and strangely wonderful with his curly, bushy hair and slender body and serious blue eyes, engrossed in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle of a sailing boat. His body seemed to cry out “Don’t disturb me!” and Balder walked up to him slowly, as if approaching an unknown and unpredictable creature.
He nonetheless managed to get the boy to take hold of his hand and follow him out into the corridor. He would never forget it. What was August thinking? What did he imagine was happening? He neither looked up at him nor at his mother and of course he ignored all the waving and the words of farewell. He just vanished into the lift with Balder. It was as simple that.
August was autistic. He was most likely also mentally disabled, even though they had not received unequivocal advice on that point and anyone who saw him from afar might easily suspect the opposite. His exquisite face radiated an air of majestic detachment, or at least suggested that he did not think it worth bothering with his surroundings. But when you looked at him closely there was something impenetrable in his gaze. And he had yet to say his first word.
In this he had failed to live up to all the prognoses made when he was two years old. At the time, the doctors had said that August probably belonged to that minority of autistic children who had no learning impairment, and that provided he was given intensive behavioural therapy his prospects were quite good. But nothing had turned out as they had hoped and Balder had no idea what had become of all that remedial care and assistance or even the boy’s schooling. Balder had run away to the U.S.A. and lived in his own world.
He had been a fool. But now he was going to repay his debt and take care of his son. Right away he ordered up casebooks and called specialists and educational experts and one thing became immediately apparent: none of the money he had been sending had gone towards August’s care, but instead had trickled out to pay for other things, probably Westman’s extravagances and gambling debts. The boy seemed to have been left pretty much to his own devices, allowed to become set in his compulsive ways, and probably worse — this was also the reason why Frans had come home.
A psychologist had called to express concern about unexplained bruises covering August’s arms and legs, chest and shoulders. According to Hanna they were because the boy had fits and hurt himself thrashing back and forth. Balder witnessed one already on the second day, and it scared him out of his wits. But that could not account for the sheer number and type of bruises, he thought.
He suspected violence and turned for help to a G.P. and a former policeman whom he knew privately. Even if they were not able to confirm his fears with any degree of certainty he grew more and more angry and set about submitting a series of formal letters and reports. He almost forgot all about the boy. He realized that it was easy to forget him. August spent most of his time sitting on the floor in the room Balder had made ready for him in the house in Saltsjöbaden, doing his exceedingly difficult jigsaws, assembling hundreds of pieces only to break them up and start afresh.
At first, Balder had observed him in fascination. It was like watching a great artist at work, and sometimes he was taken by the fantasy that the boy would glance up at any moment and say something grown-up. But August never uttered a word. If he raised his head from the puzzle it was to look straight past him towards the window overlooking the sea and the sunshine reflected in the water, and eventually Balder just left him alone. Balder seldom even took him outside into the garden.
From a legal point of view he did not have custody of the boy and he did not want to take any chances until he had sorted this out. So he let the housekeeper, Lottie Rask, do all the shopping — and all the cooking and cleaning. Balder was no good at that side of things. He understood computers and algorithms but not much else, and he immersed himself in them even more. At night he slept as badly as he had in California.
Lawsuits and storms loomed on the horizon and every evening he drank a bottle of red wine, usually Amarone, and probably that did little good either, except in the short term. He began to feel worse and worse and fantasized about vanishing in a puff of smoke or taking himself off to some inhospitable place, somewhere remote. But then, one Saturday in November, something happened. It was a cold, windy evening and he and August were walking along Ringvägen in the Södermalm district, feeling frozen.
They had been having dinner at Farah Sharif’s on Zinkens väg. August should have been asleep long since, but dinner had gone on late and Balder had revealed far too much. Farah Sharif tended to have that effect on people. Balder and she had known each other since they read computer sciences at Imperial College in London and now Farah Sharif was one of the few people at his level in Sweden, or at least one of the few who was by and large able to follow his thinking. It was an incredible relief for him to meet someone who could understand.
He also found her attractive, but despite numerous attempts he had never managed to seduce her. Balder was not much good at seducing women. But this time he had received a farewell hug that almost turned into a kiss, which was a big step forward. He was still thinking about it as he and August passed Zinkensdamm sports centre. Maybe next time he should get a babysitter and then perhaps... Who knows? A dog was barking some way off and there was a woman’s voice shouting behind him, hard to tell if she was upset or happy. He looked over towards Hornsgatan and the crossroads where they could pick up a taxi or take the Tunnelbana down to Slussen. It felt as if it might rain. Once they got to the crossing the light turned to red and on the other side of the street stood a worn-looking man in his forties who seemed vaguely familiar. At precisely that moment Balder took hold of August’s hand.
He only wanted to make sure his son stayed on the pavement, but then he felt it: August’s hand tensed as if the boy were reacting strongly to something. His look was intense and clear, as though the veil which always seemed to cover his eyes had been magically drawn aside, and instead of staring inwards at his own complexities, August had apparently understood something uniquely deep and great about that crossing. So Balder ignored the fact that the lights had turned green. He just let his son stand there and observe the scene, and without knowing why, he was overcome by a strong emotion, which he found strange. It was only a look, after all, and not even an especially bright or joyful one at that. Yet it rang a distant bell, stirred something long dormant in his memory. For the first time in an age he felt hopeful.
Chapter 2
Mikael Blomkvist had slept for only a few hours, having stayed up late to read a detective novel by Elizabeth George. Not a particularly sensible thing to do. Ove Levin, the newspaper guru from Serner Media, was due to present a strategy session for Millennium magazine later that morning and Blomkvist ought really to be rested and ready for combat.
But he had no desire to be sensible. Only reluctantly did he get up and make himself an unusually strong cappuccino with his Jura Impressa X7, a machine which had been delivered to his home a while ago with a note saying, “According to you, I don’t know how to use it anyway”. It stood there in the kitchen now like a memorial to a better time. He no longer had any contact with the person who had sent it.
These days he was hardly stimulated by his work. Over the weekend he had even considered looking around for something new, and that was a pretty drastic idea for a man like Mikael Blomkvist. Millennium had been his passion and his life, and many of his life’s best, most dramatic events had occurred in connection with the magazine. But nothing lasts for ever, perhaps not even a love for Millennium. Besides, this was not a good time to be owning a magazine dedicated to investigative journalism. All publications with ambitions for greatness were bleeding to death, and he could not help but reflect that while his own vision for Millennium may have been beautiful and true on some higher plane, it would not necessarily help the magazine survive. He went into the living room sipping his coffee and looked out at the waters of Riddarfjärden. There was quite a storm blowing out there.
From an Indian summer, which had kept the city’s outdoor restaurants and cafés open well into October, the weather had turned hellish with gusts of wind and cloudbursts, and people hurried through the streets bent double. Blomkvist had stayed in all weekend, but not only because of the weather. He had been planning revenge on an ambitious scale, but the scheme had come to nothing, and that was not like him, neither the former nor the latter.
He was not an underdog, and unlike so many other big media figures in Sweden he did not suffer from an inflated ego which needed constant boosting and soothing. On the other hand, he had been through a few tough years. Barely a month ago the financial journalist William Borg had written a piece in Serner’s Business Life magazine under the heading: MIKAEL BLOMKVIST’S DAYS ARE OVER.
The fact that the article had been written in the first place and given such prominence was of course a sign that Blomkvist’s position was still strong. No-one would say that the column was well written or original, and it should have been easy to dismiss as yet another attack by a jealous colleague. But for some reason, incomprehensible in retrospect, the whole thing blew up. At first it might have been interpreted as a spirited discussion about journalism, but gradually the debate began to go off the rails. Although the serious press stayed out of it, all kinds of invective was being spewed out on social media. The offensive came not only from financial journalists and industry types, who had reason to set upon their enemy now that he was temporarily weakened, but also from a number of younger writers who took the opportunity to make a name for themselves. They pointed out that Blomkvist was not on Twitter or Facebook and should rather be seen as a relic of a bygone age in which people could afford to work their way through whichever strange old volumes happened to take their fancy. And there were those who took the opportunity to join in the fun and create amusing hashtags like #inblomkvistsday. It was all a lot of nonsense and nobody could have cared less than Blomkvist — or so he persuaded himself.
It certainly did not help his cause that he had not had a major story since the Zalachenko affair and that Millennium really was in a crisis. The circulation was still O.K., with 21,000 subscribers. But since advertising revenue was falling dramatically and there was now no longer additional income from their successful books, and since one of the shareholders, Harriet Vanger, was not willing to put up any more capital, the board of directors had, against Blomkvist’s wishes, allowed the Norwegian Serner newspaper empire to buy 30 per cent of the shares. That was not as odd as it seemed, or not at first sight. Serner published weekly magazines and evening papers and owned a large online dating site and two pay-T.V. channels as well as a football team in Norway’s top division, and it ought not to be having anything to do with a publication like Millennium.
But Serner’s representatives — especially the head of publications Ove Levin — had assured them that the group needed a prestige product and that “everybody” in the management team admired Millennium and wanted only for the magazine to go on exactly as before. “We’re not here to make money!” Levin said. “We want to do something significant.” He immediately arranged for the magazine to receive a sizeable injection of funds.
At first Serner did not interfere on the editorial side. It was business as usual, but with a slightly better budget. A new feeling of hope spread among the editorial team, sometimes even to Blomkvist, who felt that for once he would have time to devote himself to journalism instead of worrying about finances. But then, around the time the campaign against him got under way — he would never lose the suspicion that the Serner Group had taken advantage of the situation — the tone changed and they started to apply pressure.
Levin maintained that of course the magazine should continue with its in-depth investigations, its literary reporting, its social fervour, all of that stuff. But surely it was not necessary for all the articles to be about financial irregularities, injustices and political scandals. Writing about high society — about celebrities and premieres — could also produce brilliant journalism, so he said, and he spoke with passion about Vanity Fair and Esquire in America, about Gay Talese and his classic piece, “Frank Sinatra has a Cold”, and about Norman Mailer and Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe and heaven knows who else.
Blomkvist did not actually have any objections to that, not at the time. Six months earlier he had himself written a long piece about the paparazzi industry, and as long as he could find a serious angle then he was content to profile just about any lightweight. In fact he always said it isn’t the subject that determines if it’s good journalism, it’s the reporter’s attitude. No, what he objected to was what he sensed was there between the lines: that this was the beginning of a longer-term assault and that, to the group, Millennium was just like any other magazine, a publication you can damn well shift around any which way you want until it becomes profitable — and colourless.
So on Friday afternoon, when he heard that Levin had hired a consultant and commissioned several consumer surveys to present on Monday, Blomkvist had simply gone home. For a long time he had sat at his desk or lain in bed composing various impassioned speeches about why Millennium had to remain true to its vision: there is rioting in the suburbs; an openly racist party sits in Riksdagen, the parliament; intolerance is growing; fascism is on the rise and there are homeless people and beggars everywhere. In so many ways Sweden has become a shameful nation. He came up with lots of fine and lofty words and in his daydreams he enjoyed a whole series of fantastic triumphs in which what he said was so relevant and compelling that all of the editorial team and even the entire Serner Group were roused from their delusions and decided to follow him as one.
But when sobriety set in, he realized how little weight such words carry if nobody believes in them from a financial point of view. Money talks, bullshit walks, and all that. First and foremost the magazine had to pay its way. Then they could go about changing the world. He began to wonder whether he could rustle up a good story. The prospect of a major revelation might boost the confidence of the editorial team and get them all to forget about Levin’s surveys and forecasts.
Blomkvist’s big scoop about the Swedish government conspiracy that had protected Zalachenko turned him into a news magnet. Every day he received tips about irregularities and shady dealings. Most of it, to tell the truth, was rubbish. But just occasionally an amazing story would emerge. A run-of-the-mill insurance matter or a trivial report of a missing person could be concealing something crucial. You never knew for sure. You had to be methodical and look through it all with an open mind, and so on the Saturday morning he sat down with his laptop and his notebooks and picked his way through what he had.
He kept going until 5.00 in the afternoon and he did come across the odd item which would probably have got him going ten years ago, but which did not now stir any enthusiasm. It was a classic problem; he of all people knew that. After a few decades in the profession most things feel pretty familiar, and even if something looks like a good story in intellectual terms it still might not turn you on. So when yet another squall of freezing rain whipped across the rooftops he stopped working and turned to Elizabeth George.
It wasn’t just escapism, he persuaded himself. Sometimes the best ideas occur to you while your mind is occupied with something completely different. Pieces of the puzzle can suddenly fall into place. But he failed to come up with anything more constructive than the thought that he ought to spend more time lying around like this, reading good books. When Monday morning came and with it yet more foul weather he had ploughed through one and a half George novels plus three old copies of the New Yorker which had been cluttering up his bedside table.
So there he was, sitting on the living-room sofa with his cappuccino, looking out at the storm. He had been feeling tired and listless until he got to his feet with an abrupt start — as if he had suddenly decided to pull himself together and do something — and put on his boots and his winter coat and went out. It was a parody of hell out there.
Icy, heavy, wet squalls bit into his bones as he hurried down towards Hornsgatan, which lay before him looking unusually grey. The whole of Södermalm district seemed to have been drained of all colour. Not even one tiny bright autumn leaf flew through the air. With his head bent forward and his arms crossed over his chest he continued past Maria Magdalena kyrka to Slussen, all the way until he turned right on to Götgatsbacken and as usual he slipped in between the Monki boutique and the Indigo pub, then went up to the magazine on the fourth floor, just above the offices of Greenpeace. He could already hear the buzz when he was in the stairwell.
An unusual number of people were up there. Apart from the editorial team and the key freelancers, there were three people from Serner, two consultants and Levin, Levin who had dressed down for the occasion. He no longer looked like an executive and had picked up some new expressions, among others a cheery “Hi”.
“Hi, Micke, how’s things?”
“That depends on you,” Blomkvist said, not actually meaning to sound unfriendly.
But he could tell that it was taken as a declaration of war and he nodded stiffly, walked on in and sat down on one of the chairs which had been set out so as to make a small auditorium in the office.
Levin cleared his throat and looked nervously in Blomkvist’s direction. The star reporter, who had seemed so combative in the doorway, now looked politely interested and showed no sign of wanting to have a row. But this did nothing to set Levin’s mind at ease. Once upon a time he and Blomkvist had both temped for Expressen. They mostly wrote quick news stories and a whole lot of rubbish. But afterwards in the pub they had dreamed about the big scoops and talked for hours of how they would never be satisfied with the conventional or the shallow, but instead would always dig deep. They were young and ambitious and wanted it all, all at once. There were times when Levin missed that, not the salary, of course, or the working hours, or even the easy life in the bars and the women, but the dreams — he missed the power in them. He sometimes longed for that throbbing urge to change society and journalism and to write so that the world would come to a standstill and the mighty powers bow down. Even a hotshot like himself wondered: Where did the dreams go?
Micke Blomkvist had of course made every single one of them come true, not just because he had been responsible for some of the big exposés of modern times, but also because he really wrote with that passion and power that they had fantasized about. Never once had he bowed to pressure from the establishment or compromised his ideals, whereas Levin himself... Well, really he was the one with the big career, wasn’t he? He was probably making ten times as much as Blomkvist these days and that gave him an enormous amount of pleasure. What use were Blomkvist’s scoops when he couldn’t even buy himself a country place nicer than that little shack on the island of Sandhamn? My God, what was that hut compared to a new house in Cannes? Nothing! No, it was he who had chosen the right path.
Instead of slogging it out in the daily press, Levin had taken a job as media analyst at Serner and developed a personal relationship with Haakon Serner himself, and that had changed his life and made him rich. Today he was the most senior journalist responsible for a whole series of newspaper houses and channels and he loved it. He loved the power, the money and all that went with it, yet he was not above admitting that even he sometimes dreamed about that other stuff, in small doses, of course, but still. He wanted to be regarded as a fine writer, just like Blomkvist, and that was probably why he had pushed so hard for the group to buy a stake in Millennium. A little bird had told him that the magazine was up against it and that the editor-in-chief, Erika Berger, whom he had always secretly fancied, wanted to keep on her two latest recruits, Sofie Melker and Emil Grandén, and she would not be able to do so unless they got some fresh capital.
In short, Levin had seen an unexpected opportunity to buy into one of the most prestigious brands in Swedish media. But Serner’s management was not enthusiastic, to put it mildly. On the contrary, people were heard to mutter that Millennium was old-fashioned and had a left-wing bias and a tendency to end up in fights with important advertisers and business partners. The plan would have come to nothing if Levin had not argued his case so passionately. But he had insisted. In a broader context, he argued, investing in Millennium represented a negligible amount, which might not yield vast profits but which could give them something much greater, namely credibility. Right now, after the cutbacks and blood-letting, Serner’s reputation wasn’t exactly their prime asset. Taking a stake in Millennium would be a sign that the group did after all care about journalism and freedom of expression, even if Serner’s board was not conspicuously keen on either. This much they were able to understand, and Levin got his acquisition through. For a long time it looked like a winning outcome for all parties.
Serner got good publicity and Millennium kept its staff and was able to concentrate on what it did best: carefully researched, well-written reportage, with Levin himself beaming like the sun and even taking part in a debate at the Writers’ Club, where he said in his usual modest way, “I believe in virtuous enterprise. I have always fought for investigative journalism.”
But then... he did not want to think about it. At first he was not really bothered by the campaign against Blomkvist. Ever since his former colleague’s meteoric rise in the reporting firmament, Levin had rejoiced secretly whenever Blomkvist was sneered at in the media. This time, though, his joy did not last. Serner’s young son Thorvald became aware of the commotion — social media made a big thing of it — even though he was not a man who took any interest in what journalists had to say. But he did like power and he loved to intrigue, and here he saw a chance to score some points or simply to give the older generation on the board a good drubbing. Before long he had encouraged the C.E.O. — who until quite recently had not concerned himself with such trivial matters — to declare that Millennium could not be given special treatment, but would have to adapt to the new times like all of the other products in the group.
Levin, who had just given Berger a solemn promise that he would not interfere in the editorial line, save perhaps as a “friend and adviser”, all of a sudden felt that his hands were tied and he was forced to play some intricate games behind the scenes. He did everything he could to get Berger, Malin Eriksson and Christer Malm at the magazine to buy into the new policy, which was never in fact clearly expressed — something that flares up in a panic rarely is — but which somehow entailed making Millennium younger and more commercial.
Naturally Levin kept repeating that there could be no question of compromising the magazine’s soul and provocative attitude, even if he was not sure what he meant by that. He only knew that to keep the directors happy he needed to get more glamour into the magazine and reduce the number of lengthy investigations into industry, since they were liable to irritate advertisers and make enemies for the board. But of course he did not tell Berger this.
He wanted to avoid unnecessary conflict and, standing there in front of the editorial team, he had taken the trouble to dress more casually than usual. He did not want to provoke anyone by wearing the shiny suits and ties which had become de rigueur at head office. He had instead opted for jeans, a white shirt and a dark-blue V-necked pullover which was not even cashmere. His long curly hair — which had always been his rebellious little gimmick — was tied in a ponytail, just like the edgiest journalists on T.V. But most important of all he kicked off in the humble tone he had been taught to adopt on his management courses.
“Hello, everybody,” he said. “What foul weather! I’ve said it many times before, but I’m happy to repeat it: we at Serner are incredibly proud to be accompanying you on this journey, and for me personally it amounts to more even than that. It’s the commitment to magazines like Millennium which makes my job meaningful; it reminds me why I went into this profession in the first place. Micke, do you remember how we used to sit in the Opera Bar and dream about everything we were going to achieve together? And we weren’t exactly holding back on the booze, ha ha!”
Blomkvist did not look as if he remembered. But Levin was not to be put off.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to get all nostalgic,” he said, “and there’s no reason to do so. In those days there was much more money in our industry. Just to cover some piddling little murder in the middle of nowhere we would hire a helicopter and book an entire floor at the poshest hotel, and order champagne for the after party. You know, when I was about to go off on my first overseas trip I asked Ulf Nilson, foreign correspondent at the time, what the deutschmark exchange rate was. ‘I have no idea,’ he said, ‘I set my own exchange rate.’ Ha ha! So at the time we used to pad our expenses, do you remember, Micke? Maybe we were at our most creative back then. In any case, our job was just to knock out some quick copy and we still managed to sell any number of issues. But a lot has changed since then — we all know that. We now face cut-throat competition and it’s not easy these days to make a profit in journalism, not even if you have Sweden’s best editorial team, as you do. So I thought we should talk a little bit today about the challenges of the future. Not that I imagine for one moment that I can teach you anything. I’m just going to provide you with some context for discussion. We at Serner have commissioned some surveys about your readership and the public perception of Millennium. Some of it may give you a bit of a fright. But instead of letting it get you down you should see it as a challenge, and remember, there are some totally crazy changes happening out there.”
Levin paused for a moment and wondered if the term “totally crazy” had been a mistake, if he had tried too hard to appear relaxed and youthful, and whether he had started off in too chatty and jocular a vein. As Haakon Serner would say, “It is impossible to overestimate how humourless underpaid journalists can be.” But no, he decided, I’ll fix this.
I’ll get them on my side!
Blomkvist had stopped listening more or less at the point when Levin explained that they all needed to reflect on their “digital maturity”, and so he didn’t hear them being told that the younger generation were not really aware of Millennium or Mikael Blomkvist. Unfortunately that was precisely the moment at which he decided he had had enough and went out to the coffee room. So he had no idea either that Aron Ullman, the Norwegian consultant, quite openly said, “Pathetic. Is he so scared that he’s going to be forgotten?”
But in fact nothing could have worried Blomkvist less at that moment. He was angry that Levin seemed to think consumer surveys might be their salvation. It was no bloody market analysis that had created the magazine. It was passion and fire. Millennium had got to where it was because they had all put their faith in it, and in what felt right and important without trying to guess which way the wind was blowing. For a time he just stood there in the pantry, wondering how long it would take before Berger came to join him.
The answer was about two minutes. He tried to calculate how angry she was by the sound of her heels. But when she was standing next to him she only gave him a dejected smile.
“What’s going on?” she said.
“I just couldn’t bear to listen.”
“You do realize that people feel incredibly uncomfortable when you behave like that?”
“I do.”
“And I assume you also understand that Serner can do nothing without our agreement. We still have control.”
“Like hell we do. We’re their hostages, Ricky! Don’t you get it? If we don’t do as they say they’ll withdraw their support and then we’ll be sitting there with our arses hanging out,” he said, loudly and angrily. When Berger hushed him and shook her head he added sotto voce, “I’m sorry. I’m being a brat. But I’m going home now. I need to think.”
“You’ve begun to work extremely short hours.”
“Well, I reckon I’m owed a fair bit of overtime.”
“I suppose you are. Would you like company this evening?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know, Erika,” he said, and then he left the magazine offices and went out onto Götgatsbacken.
The storm and the freezing rain lashed against him and he swore, and for a moment considered dashing into Pocketshop to buy yet another English detective novel to escape into. Instead he turned into Sankt Paulsgatan and as he was passing the sushi restaurant on the right-hand side his mobile rang. He was sure that it would be Berger. But it was Pernilla, his daughter, who had certainly chosen the worst possible time to get in touch with a father who already felt bad about how little he did for her.
“Hello, my darling,” he said.
“What’s that noise?”
“It’s the storm, I expect.”
“O.K., O.K., I’ll be quick. I’ve been accepted on the writing course at Biskops Arnö school.”
“So, now you want to be a writer,” he said, in a tone which was too harsh and almost sarcastic, and that was unfair in every way.
He should have simply congratulated her and wished her luck, but Pernilla had had so many difficult years hopping between one Christian sect and another, and from one course to another without finishing anything, that he felt exhausted by yet another change of direction.
“I don’t think I detected a whoop of joy there.”
“Sorry, Pernilla. I’m not myself today.”
“When are you ever?”
“I’m just not sure writing is such a good idea, given how the profession is looking right now. I only want you to find something that will really work for you.”
“I’m not going to write boring journalism like you.”
“Well, what are you going to write then?”
“I’m going to write for real.”
“O.K.,” he said, without asking what she meant by that. “Do you have enough money?”
“I’m working part-time at Wayne’s Coffee.”
“Would you like to come to dinner tonight, so we can talk about it?”
“Don’t have time, Pappa. It was just to let you know,” she said, and hung up, and even if he tried to see the positive side in her enthusiasm it just made his mood worse. He took a short cut across Mariatorget and Hornsgatan to reach his apartment on Bellmansgatan.
It felt as if he had only just left. He got a strange sense that he no longer had a job and that he was on the verge of entering a new existence where he had oceans of time instead of working his fingers to the bone. For a brief moment he considered tidying the place up. There were magazines and books and clothes everywhere. But instead he fetched two Pilsner Urquell from the fridge and sat down on the sofa in the living room to think everything through more soberly, as soberly as one can with a bit of beer in one’s body.
What was he to do?
He had no idea, and most worrying of all was that he was in no mood for a fight. On the contrary, he was strangely resigned, as if Millennium were slipping out of his sphere of interest. Isn’t it time to do something new? he asked himself, and he thought of Kajsa Åkerstam, a quite charming person whom he would occasionally meet for a few drinks. Åkerstam was head of Swedish Television’s “Investigative Taskforce” programme and she had been trying to recruit him for years. It had never mattered what she had offered, and how solemnly she had guaranteed backing and total integrity. Millennium had been his home and his soul. But now... maybe he should take the chance. Perhaps a job on “Investigative Taskforce” would fire him up again.
His mobile rang and for a moment he was happy. Whether it was Berger or Pernilla, he promised himself he would be friendly and really listen. But no, it was a withheld number and he answered guardedly.
“Is that Mikael Blomkvist?” said a young-sounding voice.
“Yes,” he said.
“Do you have time to talk?”
“I might if you introduced yourself.”
“My name is Linus Brandell.”
“O.K., Linus, how can I help?”
“I have a story for you.”
“Tell me.”
“I will if you can drag yourself down to the Bishops Arms across the street and meet me there.”
Blomkvist was irritated. It wasn’t just the bossy tone. It was the intrusion on his home turf.
“The telephone will do just fine.”
“It’s not something which should be discussed on an open line.”
“Why do I feel so tired when I talk to you, Linus?”
“Maybe you’ve had a bad day.”
“I have had a bad day. You’re right about that.”
“There you go. Come down to the Bishop and I’ll buy you a beer and tell you something amazing.”
Blomkvist wanted only to snap: “Stop telling me what to do!” Yet without knowing why, or perhaps because he didn’t have anything better to do than to sit in his attic apartment and brood over his future he said, “I pay for my own beers. But O.K., I’m coming.”
“A wise decision.”
“But, Linus...”
“Yes?”
“If you get long-winded and give me a load of wild conspiracy theories to the effect that Elvis is alive and you know who shot Olof Palme, then I’m coming straight home.”
“Fair enough,” Brandell said.
Chapter 3
Edwin Needham — Ed the Ned, as he was sometimes called — was not the most highly paid security technician in the U.S., but he may have been the best. He grew up in South Boston, Dorchester, and his father had been a monumental good-for-nothing, a drunk who took on casual work in the harbour but often disappeared on binges which not infrequently landed him in jail or in hospital. Yet these benders were the family’s best time, a sort of breathing space. When Ed’s father could be bothered to be around he would beat his mother black and blue. Sometimes she would spend hours or even whole days locked inside the toilet, crying and shaking. Nobody was very surprised when she died from internal bleeding at only forty-six, or when Ed’s older sister became a crack addict, still less when the remains of the family stood teetering on the brink of homelessness soon afterwards.
Ed’s childhood paved the way for a life of trouble, and during his teenage years he belonged to a gang who called themselves “The Fuckers”. They were the terror of Dorchester, and engaged in gang warfare, assault and robbing grocery stores. There was something brutal about Ed’s appearance from an early age and this was not improved by the fact that he never smiled and was missing two upper teeth. He was sturdy, tall and fearless, and his face usually bore the traces of brawls with his father or gang fights. Most of the teachers at his school were scared to death of him. All were convinced that he would end up in jail or with a bullet in his head. But there were some adults who began to take an interest in him — no doubt because they discovered that there was more than aggression and violence in his intense blue eyes.
Ed had an irrepressible thirst for knowledge, an energy which meant that he could devour a book with the same vigour with which he could trash the inside of a public bus. Often he was reluctant to go home at the end of the school day. He liked to stay on in what was known as the technology room, where there were a couple of computers. He would sit there for hours. A physics teacher with the Swedish-sounding name of Larson noticed how good he was with machines, and after social services got involved he was awarded a scholarship and transferred to a school with more motivated students.
He began to excel at his studies and was given more scholarships and distinctions and eventually — something of a miracle in view of the odds against him — he went on to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at M.I.T. In his doctoral thesis he explored some specific fears around new asymmetric cryptosystems like R.S.A., and he then went on to senior positions at Microsoft and Cisco before being recruited by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade in Maryland.
He did not have the ideal C.V. for the job, even leaving aside his criminal behaviour as a teenager. He had smoked a lot of grass at college and flirted with socialist or even anarchist ideals, and had been arrested twice for assault — nothing major, just bar fights. He still had a volcanic temper and everyone who knew him thought better of crossing him.
But at the N.S.A. they recognized his other qualities. Besides which it was the autumn of 2001. The American security services were so desperate for computer technicians that they hired pretty much anybody. During the ensuing years nobody questioned Needham’s loyalty — or patriotism, for that matter — and if anyone thought to do so, his advantages always outweighed his shortcomings.
Needham was not just amazingly gifted. There was an obsessive streak to his character, a manic precision and a furious efficiency which boded well for a man in charge of building I.T. security at America’s most highly classified agency. Nobody was damn well going to crack his system. It was a matter of personal pride for him. At Fort Meade he quickly made himself indispensable, to the point where people were constantly lining up to consult him. Not a few were terrified of him and he was often verbally abusive. He had even told the head of the N.S.A. himself, the legendary Admiral Charles O’Connor, to go to hell.
“Use your own busy fucking head for things you might just be able to comprehend,” Needham had roared when the admiral attempted to comment on his work.
But O’Connor and everyone else let it happen. They knew that Needham screamed and yelled for the right reasons — because colleagues had been careless about security regulations, or because they were talking about things beyond their understanding. Not once did he interfere in the rest of the agency’s work, even though his level of clearance gave him access to pretty much everything, and even though in recent years the agency had found itself at the centre of a heated storm of opinion with advocates of both the right and the left seeing the N.S.A. as the devil incarnate, as Orwell’s Big Brother. As far as Needham was concerned, the organization could do whatever the hell it wanted, so long as his security systems remained rigorous and intact. And since he did not yet have a family he more or less lived at the office.
Apart from the occasional drinking session, during which he sometimes turned alarmingly sentimental about his past, there was no suggestion that he had ever told outsiders what he was working on. In that other world he remained as silent as the grave and, if ever questioned about his profession, he stuck to a well-rehearsed cover story.
It was not by chance, nor was it the result of intrigue or manipulation, that he had risen through the ranks and become the N.S.A.’s most senior security chief. Needham and his team had tightened internal surveillance “so that no new whistle-blowers can pop up and punch us on the nose” and during countless sleepless nights created something he alternately called “an unbreakable wall” or “a ferocious little bloodhound”.
“No fucker can get in, and no fucker can dig around in there without permission,” he said. And he was enormously proud of that.
He had been proud, that is, until that disastrous morning in November. The day had begun beautiful and clear. Needham, who had put on quite a belly over the years, came waddling over from the coffee machine in his characteristic way. Because of his seniority he completely ignored dress codes. He was wearing jeans and a red-checked lumberjack shirt, not quite buttoned at the waist, and he sighed as he settled down at his computer. He was not feeling great. His back and right knee hurt and he cursed the fact that his long-time colleague, Alona Casales, had managed to persuade him to come out for a run the night before. Sheer sadism on her part.
Luckily there was nothing super-urgent to deal with. He only had to send an internal memo with some new procedures for those in charge of C.O.S.T., a programme for cooperation with the large I.T. companies — he had even changed the codenames. But he did not get far. He was just beginning to write, in his usual turgid prose:
when he was interrupted by one of his alerts.
He was not particularly worried. His warning systems were so sensitive that they reacted to the slightest divergence in the information flow. It was going to be an anomaly, a notification perhaps that someone was trying to exceed the limits of their authorization, or some minor interference.
As it turned out, he never had time to investigate. In the next moment something so uncanny happened that for several seconds he refused to believe it. He just sat there, staring at the screen. Yet he knew exactly what was going on. A R.A.T. had got into the NSANet intranet. Anywhere else he would have thought: Those fuckers, I’ll crush them. But in here, the most tightly closed and controlled place of all, which he and his team had gone over with a fine-toothed comb a million times just this last year to detect every minuscule little vulnerability, here, no, no, it was impossible — it could not be happening.
Without realizing it he had closed his eyes, as if hoping that it would all vanish so long as he wasn’t watching. But when he looked at the screen again, the sentence he had begun was being completed. His was continuing on its own with the words
“Jesus, Jesus,” he muttered — which was at least a sign that he was beginning to recover some of his composure.
But then the text went on:
There was not much of a crowd down at the Bishops Arms. The weather was not encouraging people to venture out, not even to the local pub. Blomkvist was nevertheless met by shouts and laughter, and by a hoarse voice bawling:
“Kalle Blomkvist!”
It came from a man with a puffy red face, a halo of frizzy hair and a fussy moustache, whom Blomkvist had seen many times in the area. He thought his name was Arne, and Arne would turn up at the pub as regularly as clockwork at 2.00 every afternoon. Today he had clearly come earlier than that and settled down at a table to the left of the bar with three drinking companions.
“Mikael Blomkvist,” Blomkvist corrected him with a smile.
Arne and his friends laughed as if Blomkvist’s actual name was the biggest joke of all.
“Got any good scoops?” Arne said.
“I’m thinking about blowing wide open the whole murky scene at the Bishops Arms.”
“You reckon Sweden’s ready for a story like that?”
“No, probably not.”
In truth Blomkvist quite liked this crowd, not that he ever talked to them more than in throw-away lines and banter. But these men were a part of the local scene which made him feel at home in the area, and he was not in the least bit offended when one of them shot out, “I’ve heard that you’re washed up.”
Far from upsetting him, it brought the whole campaign against him down to the low, almost farcical level where it belonged.
“I’ve been washed up for the last fifteen years, hello to you brother bottle, all good things must pass,” he said, quoting the poet Fröding and looking around for someone who might have had the gall to order a tired journalist down to the pub. Since he saw no-one apart from Arne and his gang he went up to Amir at the bar.
Amir was big and fat and jolly, a hard-working father of four who had been running the pub for some years. He and Blomkvist had become good friends. Not because Blomkvist was an especially regular customer, but because they had helped each other out in completely different ways; once or twice when Blomkvist had not had the time to get to the state liquor store and was expecting female company, Amir had supplied him with a couple of bottles of red wine, and Blomkvist in turn had helped a friend of Amir’s, who had no papers, to write letters to the authorities.
“To what do we owe this honour?” Amir said.
“I’m meeting someone.”
“Anyone exciting?”
“I don’t think so. How’s Sara?”
Sara was Amir’s wife and had just had a hip operation.
“Complaining and taking painkillers.”
“Sounds like hard work. Give her my best.”
“Will do,” Amir said, and they chatted about this and that.
But Linus Brandell did not show up and Blomkvist thought it was probably a practical joke. On the other hand there were worse tricks than to have someone lure you down to your local pub, so he stayed for fifteen minutes discussing a number of financial and health-related concerns before he turned and walked towards the door, and that was when Brandell appeared.
Nobody understood how Gabriella Grane had ended up at Säpo, Swedish Security Police, least of all she herself. She had been the sort of girl for whom everybody had predicted a glittering future. Her old girlfriends from the classy suburb of Djursholm worried that she was thirty-three and neither famous nor wealthy nor married, either to a rich man or to any man at all for that matter.
“What’s happened to you, Gabriella? Are you going to be a police officer all your life?”
Most of the time she could not be bothered to argue back, or point out that she was not a police officer but had been head-hunted for the position of analyst, and that these days she was writing far more challenging texts than she ever had at the Foreign Ministry or during her summers as a leader writer for Svenska Dagbladet. Apart from which, she was not allowed to talk about most of it in any case. So she might as well keep quiet and simply come to terms with the fact that working for the Swedish Security Police was considered to be about as low as you can go — both by her status-obsessed friends and even more so by her intellectual pals.
In their eyes, Säpo were a bunch of clumsy right-leaning idiots who went after Kurds and Arabs for what were fundamentally racist reasons, and who had no qualms about committing serious crimes or infringements of civil rights in order to protect former senior Soviet spies. And indeed sometimes she was on their side. There was incompetence in the organization, and values that were unsound, and the Zalachenko affair remained a major blot. But that was not the whole truth. Stimulating and important work was being done as well, especially now after the shake-out, and sometimes she had the impression that it was at Säpo, not in any editorial or lecture hall, that people best understood the upheavals that were taking place across the world. But of course she often asked herself: How did I end up here, and why have I stayed?
Presumably some of it was down to flattery. No less a person than Helena Kraft, the newly appointed chief of Säpo at the time, had contacted her and said that after all the disasters and bad press they had to rethink their approach to recruitment. We need to “bring on board the real talents from the universities and, quite honestly Gabriella, there’s no better person than you,” and that was all it had taken.
Grane was hired as an analyst in counter-espionage and later in the Industry Protection Group. Even though as a young woman, attractive in a slightly proper sort of way, she got called a “daddy’s girl” and “snotty upper-class bitch”, she was a star recruit, quick and receptive and able to think outside the box. And she could speak Russian. She had learned it alongside her studies at the Stockholm School of Economics, where needless to say she had been a model student but never that keen. She dreamed of something bigger than a life in business, so after her graduation she applied for a job at the Foreign Ministry and of course was accepted. But she did not find that especially stimulating either — the diplomats were too stiff and neatly combed. It was then that Helena Kraft had got in touch. Grane had been at Säpo for five years now and had gradually been accepted for the talent that she was, even if it was not always easy.
It had been a trying day, and not just because of the ghastly weather. The head of division, Ragnar Olofsson, had appeared in her office looking surly and humourless and told her that she should damn well not be flirting when she was out on an assignment.
“Flirting?”
“Flowers have been delivered.”
“And that’s my fault?”
“Yes, I do think you have a responsibility there. When we’re out in the field we have to show discipline and reserve at all times. We represent an absolutely key public agency.”
“Well, that’s great, Ragnar dear. One always learns something from you. Now I finally understand that I’m responsible for the fact that the head of research at Ericsson can’t tell the difference between normal polite behaviour and flirting. Now I realize that I should blame myself when men indulge in such wildly wishful thinking that they see a sexual invitation in a simple smile.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Olofsson said, and he disappeared. Later she regretted having answered back.
That kind of outburst rarely does any good. On the other hand, she had been taking shit for far too long. It was time to stand up for herself. She quickly tidied her desk and got out a report from G.C.H.Q. in Britain about Russian industrial espionage against European software companies, which she had not yet had time to read. Then the telephone rang. It was Kraft, and that made Grane happy. She had never yet called to complain or moan. On the contrary.
“I’ll get straight to the point,” Kraft said. “I’ve had a call from the U.S., it may be a bit of an emergency. Can you take it on your Cisco? We’ve arranged a secure line.”
“Of course.”
“Good. I’d like you to interpret the information for me, see if there’s anything in it. It sounds serious, but I can’t get a handle on the person who’s passing on the information — who, by the way, says that she knows you.”
“Put me through.”
It was Alona Casales at the N.S.A. — although for a moment Grane wondered if it really was her. When they had last met, at a conference in Washington D.C., Casales had been a self-assured and charismatic lecturer in what she somewhat euphemistically described as active-signals surveillance — hacking, in other words. Afterwards she and Grane had gone out for drinks, and almost against her will, Grane had been enchanted. Casales smoked cigarillos and had a dark and sensuous voice well-suited to her punchy one-liners and frequent sexual allusions. But now on the telephone she sounded confused and sometimes unaccountably lost the thread of what she was saying.
Blomkvist did not really know what to expect, a fashionable young man, presumably, some cool dude. But the fellow who had arrived looked like a tramp, short and with torn jeans and long, dark, unwashed hair and something slightly sleepy and shifty in his eyes. He was maybe twenty-five, perhaps younger, had bad skin and a fringe which concealed his eyes and a rather ugly mouth sore. Linus Brandell did not look like someone who was sitting on a major scoop.
“Linus Brandell, I presume.”
“That’s right. Sorry I’m late. Happened to bump into a girl I knew. We were in the same class in ninth grade, and she—”
“Let’s get this over with,” Blomkvist interrupted him, and led the way to a table towards the back of the pub.
When Amir appeared, smiling discreetly, they ordered two pints of Guinness and then sat quietly for a few seconds. Blomkvist could not understand why he felt so irritated. It was not like him; perhaps the whole drama with Serner was getting to him after all. He smiled towards Arne and his gang, all of whom were studying them keenly.
“I’ll come straight to the point,” Brandell said.
“That sounds good.”
“Do you know Supercraft?”
Blomkvist did not know much about computer games. But even he had heard of Supercraft.
“By name, yes.”
“No more than that?”
“No.”
“In that case you won’t know that what makes this game different, or at least so special, is that it has a particular A.I. function that allows you to communicate with a player about war strategy without being really sure, at least to begin with, whether it’s a real person or a digital creation that you’re talking to.”
“You don’t say,” Blomkvist said. He couldn’t care less about the finer points of a damn computer game.
“It’s a minor revolution in the industry and I was actually involved in developing it,” Brandell said.
“Congratulations. In that case you must have made a killing.”
“That’s just it.”
“Meaning what?”
“The technology was stolen from us and now Truegames are making billions while we don’t get a single öre.”
Blomkvist had heard this line before. He had even spoken to an old lady who claimed that it was actually she who had written the Harry Potter books and that J.K. Rowling had stolen everything by telepathy.
“So how did it happen?” he said.
“We were hacked.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s been established by experts at the National Defence Radio Establishment — I can give you a name there if you want — and also by a...”
Brandell hesitated.
“Yes?”
“Nothing. But even the Security Police were involved — you can talk to Gabriella Grane there. She’s an analyst and I think she’ll back me up. She has also mentioned the incident in a public report published last year. I have the reference number here...”
“In other words, this isn’t news,” Blomkvist interrupted.
“No, not in that sense. New Technology and Computer Sweden wrote about it. But since Frans didn’t want to talk about it and on a couple of occasions even denied that there had been any breach at all, the story never went very far.”
“But it’s still old news.”
“I suppose so.”
“So why should I be listening to you, Linus?”
“Because now Frans seems to have understood what happened. I think he’s sitting on pure dynamite. He’s become completely manic about security. Only uses hyper-encryption for his phones and email and he’s just got a new burglar alarm with cameras and sensors and all that crap. I think you should talk to him — that’s why I got in touch with you. A guy like you can perhaps get him to open up. He doesn’t listen to me.”
“So you order me down here because it seems as if someone called Frans may be sitting on some dynamite.”
“Not someone called Frans, Blomkvist, it’s none other than Frans Balder; didn’t I say that? I was one of his assistants.”
Blomkvist searched his memory: the only Balder he could think of was Hanna Balder, the actress, whatever might have become of her.
“Who’s he?” he said.
The look he got was so full of contempt that he was taken aback.
“Where’ve you been living? Mars? Frans Balder is a legend. A household name.”
“Really?”
“Christ, yes!” Brandell said. “Google him and you’ll see. He became a professor of computer sciences at just twenty-seven and for two decades he’s been a leading authority on research in artificial intelligence. There’s hardly anyone who’s as far advanced in the development of quantum computing and neural networks. He has an amazingly cool, back-to-front brain. Thinks along completely unorthodox, ground-breaking lines, and as you can probably imagine the computer industry’s been chasing him for years. But for a long time Balder refused to let himself be recruited. He wanted to work alone. Well, not altogether alone — he’s always had assistants whom he’s driven into the ground. He wants results, and he’s always saying: ‘Nothing is impossible. Our job is to push back the frontiers, blah blah blah.’ But people listen to him. They’ll do anything for him. They’ll just about die for him. To us nerds he is God Almighty.”
“I can hear that.”
“But don’t think that I’m some star-struck admirer, not at all. There’s a price to be paid, I know that better than anyone. You can do great things with him. But you can also go to pieces. Balder isn’t even allowed to look after his own son. He messed up in some unforgivable way. There are a lot of different stories, assistants who’ve hit the wall and wrecked their lives and God knows what. But although he’s always been obsessive he’s never behaved like this before. I just know he’s onto something big.”
“You just know that.”
“You’ve got to understand, he’s not normally a paranoid person. Quite the opposite — he’s never been anywhere near paranoid enough, given the level of the things he’s been dealing with. But now he’s locked himself into his house and hardly goes out. He seems afraid and normally he really doesn’t do scared.”
“And he was working on computer games?” Blomkvist said, without hiding his scepticism.
“Well... since he knew that we were all gaming freaks he probably thought that we should get to work on something that we liked. But his A.I. program was also right for that business. It was a perfect testing environment and we got fantastic results. We broke new ground. It was just that—”
“Get to the point, Linus.”
“The thing is that Frans and his lawyers wrote a patent application for the most innovative parts of the technology, and that’s when the first shock came. A Russian engineer at Truegames had thrown together an application just before, which blocked our patent, and that can hardly have been a coincidence. But that didn’t really matter. The patent was only a paper tiger. The interesting thing was how the hell they had managed to find out about what we’d been doing. Since we were all devoted to Frans even to the point of death, there was actually only one possibility: we must have been hacked, in spite of all our security measures.”
“Is that when you got in touch with the Security Police and the National Defence Radio Establishment?”
“Not at first. Balder is not too keen on people who wear ties and work from nine to five. He prefers obsessive idiots who are glued to their computers all night long, so instead he got in touch with some weirdo hacker he had met somewhere and she said straight away that we’d had a breach. Not that she seemed particularly credible. I wouldn’t have hired her, if you see what I mean, and perhaps she was just talking drivel. But her main conclusions were nevertheless subsequently borne out by people at the N.D.R.E.”
“But no-one knew who had hacked you?”
“No, no, trying to trace hacker breaches is often a complete waste of time. But they must have been professionals. We had done a lot of work on our I.T. security.”
“And now you suspect that Balder may have found out something more about it?”
“Definitely. Otherwise he wouldn’t be behaving so strangely. I’m convinced he got wind of something at Solifon.”
“Is that where he worked?”
“Yes, oddly enough. As I told you before, Balder had previously refused to let himself be tied up by the big computer giants. No-one has ever banged on as much as he did about being an outsider, about the importance of being independent and not being a slave to commercial forces. But out of the blue, as we stood there with our trousers down and our technology stolen, he suddenly took up an offer from Solifon, of all companies, and nobody could understand it. O.K., they were offering a mega-salary, free rein and all of that crap: like, do whatever the hell you want, but work for us, and that probably sounded cool. It would definitely have been cool for anyone who wasn’t Frans Balder. But he’d had any number of offers like that from Google, Apple and all the others. Why was this suddenly so interesting? He never explained. He just took his clobber and disappeared, and from what I’ve heard it went swimmingly at first. Balder continued to develop our technology and I think the owner, Nicolas Grant, was beginning to fantasize about revenues in billions. There was great excitement. But then something happened.”
“Something that you don’t actually know so much about.”
“No, we lost contact. Balder lost contact with pretty much everyone. But I understand enough to know that it must have been something serious. He had always preached openness and enthused about the Wisdom of Crowds, all that stuff: the importance of using the knowledge of many, the whole Linux way of thinking. But at Solifon he apparently kept every comma secret, even from those who were closest to him, and then — wham bam — he gave notice and went home, and now he’s sitting there in his house in Saltsjöbaden and doesn’t even go out into the garden or give a damn how he looks.”
“So what you’ve got, Linus, is a story about a professor who seems to be under pressure and who doesn’t care what he looks like — though it’s not clear how the neighbours can see that, if he never goes outside?”
“Yes, but I think—”
“Listen, this could be an interesting story, I get that. But unfortunately it isn’t for me. I’m no I.T. reporter — as someone so wisely wrote the other day, I’m a caveman. I’d recommend you contact Raoul Sigvardsson at the Svenska Morgon-Posten. He knows everything about that world.”
“No, no, Sigvardsson is a lightweight. This is way above his head.”
“I think you underestimate him.”
“Come on now, don’t chicken out. This could be your comeback, Blomkvist.”
Blomkvist made a tired gesture towards Amir, who was wiping a table not far from them.
“Can I give you some advice?” Blomkvist said.
“What...? Yes... sure.”
“Next time you have a story to sell, don’t try to explain to the reporter what’s in it for him. Do you know how many times people have played me that tune? ‘This is going to be the biggest thing in your career. Bigger than Watergate!’ You’d do better with just some basic matter-of-fact information, Linus.”
“I just meant...”
“Yes, what actually did you mean?”
“That you should talk to him. I think he would like you. You’re the same uncompromising kind of guy.”
It was as if Brandell had suddenly lost his self-confidence and Blomkvist wondered if he had not been unnecessarily tough. As a general principle, he tended to be friendly and encouraging towards people who gave him tip-offs, however weird they sounded, not just because there might be a good story even in something that sounded crazy, but also because he recognized that often he was their last straw. There were many who turned to him when everyone else had stopped listening. He was the last hope, and there was never any excuse to be scornful.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve had a really bad day and I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic.”
“That’s O.K.”
“And you know,” Blomkvist said, “there is actually one thing which interests me about this story. You said you had a visit from a female hacker.”
Alona Casales was not one to become nervous easily and she rarely had trouble staying on topic. She was forty-eight, tall and outspoken, with a voluptuous figure and small intelligent eyes which could make anybody feel insecure. She often seemed to see straight through people and did not suffer from a surfeit of deference to superiors. She would give anyone a dressing down, even the Attorney General if he came calling. That was one of the reasons why Ed the Ned got on so well with her. Neither of them attached much importance to status; all they cared about was ability.
Nevertheless, she had completely lost it with the head of Sweden’s Security Police. This had absolutely nothing to do with Helena Kraft, it was because of the drama unfolding in the open-plan office behind her. Admittedly they were all used to Needham’s explosions of rage. But something told her right away that what was going on now was on an altogether different scale.
The man seemed paralysed. While Casales sat there blurting some confused words down the line, people gathered around him, and all of them, without exception, looked scared. But perhaps because she was in a state of shock, Casales did not hang up or say that she would call back later. She let herself be put through to Gabriella Grane, that charming young analyst whom she had met and tried to seduce in Washington. Even though Casales had not succeeded in taking her to bed, she had been left with a deep feeling of pleasure.
“Hello, my dear,” she said. “How are you?”
“Not so bad,” Grane answered. “We’re having some terrible storms, but otherwise everything’s fine”
“I really enjoyed that last time we saw each other.”
“Absolutely, it was nice. I was hungover the whole of the next day. But I don’t suppose you’re calling to ask me out.”
“Unfortunately not. I’m calling because we’ve picked up signs of a serious threat to a Swedish scientist.”
“Who?”
“For a long time we had trouble understanding the information, or even working out which country it concerned. The communication was encrypted and used only vague codenames, but still, using a few small pieces of the puzzle we managed... what the hell...?”
“What?”
“One second...!”
Casales’ computer screen blinked, then went blank, and as far as she could see the same thing was happening all over the office floor. For a moment she wondered what to do, but carried on the conversation; it might just be a power outage, after all, although the overhead lights seemed to be working.
“I’m still here,” Grane said.
“Thanks, I appreciate it. Sorry about this. It’s complete chaos here. Where was I?”
“You were talking about pieces of the puzzle.”
“Right, yes, we put two and two together, because there’s always one person who’s careless, however professional they try to be, or who...”
“Yes?”
“Um... talks, gives an address or something, in this case it was more like...”
Casales fell silent again. None other than Commander Jonny Ingram, one of the most senior people in the N.S.A. with contacts high up in the White House, had come onto the office floor. Ingram was trying to appear as composed as usual. He even cracked some joke to a group sitting further away. But he was not fooling anyone. Beneath his polished and tanned exterior — ever since his time as head of the cryptological centre on Oahu he was suntanned all year round — you could sense something nervous in his expression, and now he seemed to want everybody’s attention.
“Hello, are you still there?” Grane said on the other end of the line.
“I’m going to have to leave you unfortunately. I’ll call you back,” Casales said, and hung up. At that moment she became very worried indeed.
There was a feeling in the air that something terrible had happened, maybe another major terrorist attack. But Ingram carried on with his soothing act and, even though there was sweat on his upper lip and forehead, he kept repeating that it was nothing serious. Most likely a virus, he said, which had found its way into the intranet, despite all the security precautions.
“To be on the safe side, we’ve shut down our servers,” he said, and for a moment he really did manage to calm things down. “What the hell,” people seemed to be saying. “A virus isn’t such a big deal.”
But then Ingram started spouting such vague statements that Casales could not stop herself from shouting:
“Tell us what’s actually happening!”
“We don’t know that much yet. But it’s possible that our systems have been hacked. We’ll get back to you as soon as we know more,” Ingram said, looking concerned, and a murmur ran through the room.
“Is it the Iranians again?” somebody wondered.
“We think...” Ingram said.
He got no further. Ed Needham, the one who should have been standing there in the first place, explaining what was happening, interrupted him brusquely and got to his feet, a bear of a man, and at that moment there was no denying that he was an imposing sight. Gone was the deflated Ed from a minute before; he now exuded a tremendous sense of determination.
“No,” he hissed. “It’s a hacker, a fucking super-hacker, and I’m going to cut his balls off.”
“The female hacker doesn’t really have anything to do with this story,” Brandell said, nursing his beer. “She was probably more like Balder’s social project.”
“But she seemed to know her stuff.”
“Or she was just lucky. She talked a lot of rubbish.”
“So you met her?”
“Yes, just after Balder took off for Silicon Valley.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Almost a year. I’d moved our computers into my apartment on Brantingsgatan. My life was not great, to put it mildly. I was single and broke and hung over, my place looked like hell. I had just spoken to Balder on the telephone, and he’d been going on like some boring old dad. There was a lot of: don’t judge her by how she looks, appearances can be deceptive, blah blah and hey, he said that to me! I’m not exactly the ideal son-in-law myself. I’ve never worn a jacket and tie in my entire life, and if anyone knows what people look like in the hacker community, then I do. Whatever, so I was sitting there waiting for this girl. Thought that she would at least knock. But she just opened the door and walked in.”
“What did she look like?”
“Bloody awful... but then, she was also sexy in a weird way. But dreadful!”
“Linus, I’m not asking you to rate her looks. I just want to know what she was wearing and if she maybe mentioned what her name was.”
“I have no idea who she was,” Brandell said, “although I did recognize her from somewhere — I had the feeling that it was something bad. She was tattooed and pierced and all that crap and looked like a heavy rocker or goth or punk, plus she was as thin as hell.”
Hardly aware that he was doing it, Blomkvist gestured to Amir to pull him another Guinness.
“What happened?” he said.
“Well, what can I say? I guess I thought that we didn’t have to get going right away, so I sat down on my bed — there wasn’t much else to sit on — and suggested that we might have a drink or something first. But do you know what she did then? She asked me to leave. She ordered me out of my own home, as if that was the most natural thing in the world, and obviously I refused. I was like: ‘I do actually live here.’ But she said, ‘Piss off, get lost,’ and I didn’t see what choice I had so I was out for a while. When I got back she was lying there on my bed, smoking, how sick is that? And reading a book about string theory or something, and maybe I gave her some sort of dodgy look, what do I know. She just said that she wasn’t planning on having sex with me, not even a little. ‘Not even a little,’ she said, and I don’t think she looked me in the eye even once. She just announced that we’d had a Trojan, a R.A.T., and that she recognized the pattern in the breach, the level of originality in the programming. ‘You’ve been blown,’ she said. And then she walked out.”
“Without saying goodbye?”
“Without a single damn word of goodbye.”
“Christ.”
“But to be honest I think she was just bullshitting. The guy at the N.D.R.E., who did the same investigation a little while later, and who probably knew much more about these kinds of attacks, was very clear that you couldn’t draw any conclusions like that, and that however much he searched through our computer he couldn’t find any old spyware. But still his guess was — Molde was his name, by the way, Stefan Molde — that we’d been hacked.”
“This woman, did she ever introduce herself in any way?”
“I did actually press her, but all she would say, and pretty surly she was too, was that I could call her Pippi. It was obvious that that wasn’t her real name, but still...”
“Still what?”
“I thought that it suited her somehow.”
“You know,” Blomkvist said, “I was just about to head home again.”
“Yes, I noticed that.”
“But now everything’s changed in a pretty major way. Didn’t you say that your Professor Balder knew this woman?”
“Well, yes.”
“In that case I want to talk to him as soon as possible.”
“Because of the woman?”
“Something like that.”
“O.K., fine,” Brandell said thoughtfully. “But you won’t find any contact details for him. He’s become so bloody secretive, like I said. Do you have an iPhone?”
“I do.”
“In that case you can forget it. Frans sees Apple as more or less in the pocket of the N.S.A. To talk to him you’ll have to buy a Blackphone or at least borrow an Android and download a special encryption program. But I’ll see to it that he gets in touch with you, so you can arrange to meet in some secure place.”
“Great, Linus. Thanks.”
Chapter 4
Grane had just put on her coat to go home when Casales called again, and at first she was irritated, not only because of the confusion last time. She wanted to get going before the storm got out of hand. The news on the radio had forecast winds of up to thirty metres per second and the temperature falling to -10 °C, and she was not dressed for it.
“I’m sorry it took a while,” Casales said. “We’ve had an insane morning. Total chaos.”
“Here too,” Grane said politely, but looking at her watch.
“But I do have something important to tell you, as I said, at least I think I do. It isn’t that easy to analyse. I just started checking out a group of Russians, did I mention that?” Casales said.
“No.”
“Well, there are probably Germans and Americans involved as well and possibly one or more Swedes.”
“What sort of group are we talking about?”
“Criminals, sophisticated criminals who don’t rob banks or sell drugs any more. Instead they steal corporate secrets and confidential business information.”
“Black hats.”
“They’re not just hackers. They also blackmail and bribe people. Possibly they even carry out old-fashioned crimes, like murder. I don’t have much on them yet, to be honest, mostly codenames and unconfirmed links, and then a couple of real names, some young computer engineers in junior positions. The group is active in suspected industrial espionage and that’s why the case has ended up on my desk. We’re afraid that cutting-edge American technology has fallen into Russian hands.”
“I understand.”
“But it isn’t easy to get at them. They’re good at encryption and, no matter how hard I try, I haven’t been able to get any closer to whoever leads them than to catch that their boss goes by the name of Thanos.”
“Thanos?”
“Yes, derived from Thanatos, the god of death in Greek mythology, the one who’s the son of Nyx — night — and twin brother to Hypnos — sleep.”
“Real cloak-and-dagger stuff.”
“Actually, it’s pretty childish. Thanos is a supervillain in Marvel Comics, you know that series with heroes like the Hulk, Iron Man and Captain America. First of all it’s not particularly Russian, but more than that it’s... how shall I put it...?”
“Both playful and arrogant?”
“Yes, like a bunch of cocky college kids messing around, and that really annoys me. In fact there’s a whole lot that worries me about this story, and that’s why I got so worked up when we learned through our signals surveillance that someone in the network may have defected, somebody who could maybe give us some insight — if only we could get our hands on this guy before they do. But now that we’ve looked more carefully at this, we realize it wasn’t at all what we thought.”
“Meaning what?”
“The guy who quit wasn’t some criminal, but the opposite, an honest guy who resigned from a company where this organization has moles, someone who presumably happened to stumble on some key information...”
“Keep going.”
“In our view this person is now seriously under threat. He needs protection, but until recently we had no idea where to look for him. We didn’t even know which company he’d worked at. But now we think we’ve zeroed in,” Casales said. “You see, in the last few days one of these characters mentioned something about this guy, said that ‘with him all the bloody Ts went up in smoke’.”
“The bloody Ts?”
“Yes, cryptic and strange, but it had the advantage of being specific and highly searchable. While ‘bloody Ts’ didn’t give us anything, Ts generally, words beginning with T in conjunction with companies, high-tech firms of course, kept leading us to the same place — to Nicolas Grant and his maxim: Tolerance, Talent and Teamwork.”
“We’re talking Solifon here, right?” Grane said.
“We think so. At least it felt like everything had fallen into place, so we began to investigate who had left Solifon recently. The company always has such a high staff turnover, it’s actually part of their philosophy — that talent should flow in and out. But then we started to think specifically about those Ts. Are you familiar with them?”
“Only what you’ve told me.”
“They’re Grant’s recipe for creativity. By tolerance he means that you need to be open to unconventional ideas and unconventional people. Talent — it doesn’t just achieve results, it attracts other gifted people and helps create an environment that people want to be in. And all these talents have to form a team. As I’m sure you know, Solifon’s been a remarkable success story, producing pioneering technology in a whole series of fields. But then this new genius popped up, a Swede, and with him...”
“... all the bloody Ts went up in smoke.”
“Exactly.”
“And it was Frans Balder.”
“Exactly. I don’t think he’d normally had any problem with tolerance, or with teamwork for that matter. But from the beginning there was apparently something toxic about him. He refused to share anything, and in no time at all he managed to destroy the rapport among the elite researchers at the company, especially when he started accusing people of being thieves and copycats. There was a scene with the owner too. But Grant has refused to tell us what it was about — just that it was something private. Soon after, Balder gave notice.”
“I know.”
“Most people were probably relieved when he took off. The air at work became easier to breathe, and people began to trust each other again, at least up to a point. But Grant wasn’t happy, and more importantly his lawyers weren’t happy either. Balder had taken with him whatever he had been developing at Solifon, and there was a rumour — maybe because no-one really knew what it was — that he was on to something sensational that could revolutionize the quantum computer, which Solifon was working on.”
“And from a purely legal point of view, whatever he’d produced belonged to the company and not to him personally.”
“Correct. So even though Balder had been going on about theft, when all was said and done he himself was the thief. Any day now things are likely to blow up in court, as you know, unless Balder manages to use whatever he has to frighten the lawyers. That information is his life insurance, he says, and it may well be true. But in the worst-case scenario it could also be...”
“... the death of him.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Casales said. “We’re picking up stronger indications that something serious is getting underway, and your boss tells me that you might be able to help us with the puzzle.”
Grane looked at the storm that was now raging outside, and longed desperately to go home and get away from all this. Yet she took off her coat and sat down again, feeling deeply uneasy.
“How can I help?”
“What do you think he found out?”
“Do I take that to mean that you haven’t managed either to bug him or hack him?”
“I’m not going to answer that one, sweetheart. But what do you think?”
Grane remembered how Frans Balder had stood in the doorway of her office not so long ago and muttered about dreaming of “a new kind of life” — whatever he may have meant by that.
“Perhaps you know,” she said, “that I met him before he joined Solifon, because he claimed that his research had been stolen from him. I didn’t take to him much. Then when he came back there was talk in-house of getting him some form of protection, so I met him a couple of times more. His transformation over the last few weeks was actually incredible. Not only because he had shaved off his beard, tidied up his hair and lost some weight. He was also mellower, even a little bit unsure of himself. I could tell that he was rattled, and at one point he did say that he thought there were people who wanted to harm him.”
“In what way?”
“Not actually physically, he said. It was more his research and his reputation they were after. But I’m not so sure that, deep down, he believed it would stop there, so I suggested that he get a guard dog. I thought a dog would be excellent company for a man who lived out in the suburbs in far too big a house. But he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I can’t have a dog now,’ he said rather sharply.”
“Why’s that, do you think?”
“I really don’t know. But I got the feeling that there was something weighing on him, and he didn’t protest too much when I arranged for a sophisticated alarm system in his house. It’s just been installed.”
“By whom?”
“A company we often use, Milton Security.”
“Good. But my recommendation is to move him to a safe house.”
“Is it that bad?”
“We think the risk is real.”
“O.K.,” Grane said. “If you send over some documentation I’ll have a word with my superior right away.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not sure what I can get my hands on. We’ve been having... some computer issues.”
“Can an agency like yours really afford to have that sort of thing?”
“No, you’re right. Let me get back to you, sweetheart,” she said, and hung up. Grane remained quite still and looked out at the storm lashing against the window with increasing fury.
Then she picked up her Blackphone and rang Balder. She let it ring and ring. Not just to warn him and see to it that he move to a safe place at once, but also because she suddenly wanted to know what he had meant when he said: “These past few days I’ve been dreaming about a new kind of life.”
No-one would have believed that at that moment Balder was fully occupied with his son.
Blomkvist remained sitting for a while after Brandell had left, drinking his Guinness and staring out at the storm. Behind him, Arne and his gang were laughing at something. But Blomkvist was so engrossed in his thoughts that he heard nothing, and hardly even noticed that Amir had sat down next to him and was giving him the latest weather forecast.
The temperature was already down to -10 °C. The first snow of the year was expected to fall, and not in any pleasant or picturesque way. The misery was going to come blasting in sideways in the worst storm the country had seen for a long time.
“Could get hurricane-force winds,” Amir said, and Blomkvist, who still was not listening, just said, “That’s good.”
“Good?”
“Yes... well... better than no weather at all.”
“I suppose. But are you alright? You look shaken up. Wasn’t it a useful meeting?”
“Sure, it was fine.”
“But what you got to hear rattled you, didn’t it?”
“I’m not certain. Things are just a mess right now. I’m thinking of quitting Millennium.”
“I thought you basically were that magazine.”
“I thought so too. But I guess there’s an end to everything.”
“That’s probably true,” Amir said. “My old man used to say that there’s even an end to eternity.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“I think he was talking about love everlasting. It was shortly before he left my mother.”
Blomkvist chuckled. “I haven’t been so good at everlasting love myself. On the other hand...”
“Yes, Mikael?”
“There’s a woman I used to know — she’s been out of my life for some time now.”
“Tricky.”
“Well, yes, it is. But now I’ve had a sign of life from her, or at least I think I did, and perhaps that’s what’s got me looking a bit funny.”
“Right.”
“I’d better get myself home. What do I owe you?”
“We can settle up another time.”
“Great, take care, Amir,” he said. He walked past the regulars, who threw a few random comments at him, and stepped into the storm.
It was a near-death experience. Gusts of wind blew straight through his body, but in spite of them he stood still for a while, lost in old memories. He thought about a dragon tattoo on a skinny pale back, a cold snap on Hedeby Island in the midst of a decades-old missing-person case and a dug-up grave in Gosseberga that was nearly the resting place of a woman who refused to give up. Then he walked home slowly. For some reason he had trouble getting the door open, had to jiggle the key around. He kicked off his shoes and sat at his computer and searched for information on Frans Balder, Professor.
But he was alarmingly unfocused and instead found himself wondering, as he had so many times before: where had she disappeared to? Apart from some news from her one-time employer, Dragan Armansky, he had not heard a word about her. It was as if she had vanished off the face of the earth and, although they lived in more or less the same part of town, he had never caught a glimpse of her.
Of course, the person who had turned up at Brandell’s apartment that day could have been someone else. It was possible, but not likely. Who other than Salander would come stomping in like that? It must have been Salander, and Pippi... that was typical.
The name by her doorbell on Fiskargatan was V. KULLA and he could well see why she did not use her real name. It was all too searchable and associated with one of the most high-profile trials the country had ever seen. Admittedly, it was not the first time that the woman had vanished in a puff of smoke. But ever since that day when he had knocked on her door on Lundagatan and given her hell for having written a personal investigation report about him which was much too thorough, they had never been apart for so long and it felt a little strange, didn’t it? After all, Salander was his... well, what the hell was she, in point of fact?
Hardly his friend. One sees one’s friends. Friends don’t disappear like that. Friends don’t only get in touch by hacking into your computer. Yet he still felt this bond with Salander and, above all, he worried about her. Her old guardian Holger Palmgren used to say that Lisbeth Salander would always get by. Despite her appalling childhood, or maybe because of it, she was one hell of a survivor, and there was probably a lot of truth in that. But one could never be sure, not with a woman of such a background, and with that knack for making enemies. Perhaps she really had lost it, as Armansky had hinted when he and Blomkvist met over lunch at Gondolen about six months ago. It was a spring day, a Saturday, and Armansky had offered to buy beer and snaps and all the rest of it. Even though they were ostensibly meeting as two old friends, there was no doubt that Armansky only wanted to talk about Salander and, with the help of a few drinks, indulge in a spot of sentimentality.
Among other things, Armansky told Blomkvist that his company, Milton Security, had supplied a number of personal alarms to a nursing home in Högdalen. Good equipment, he said.
But not even the best equipment in the world will help you if the electricity goes off and nobody can be bothered to fix it, and that is precisely what happened. There was a power outage at the home late one evening, and in the course of that night one of the residents, a lady called Rut Åkerman, fell and broke her femur, and she lay there for hour after hour pressing the button on her alarm to no avail. By the morning she was in a critical condition and, since the papers were just then focusing heavily on negligence in care for the elderly, the whole thing became a big deal.
Happily, the old lady pulled through. But she also happened to be the mother of a senior figure in the Swedish Democrats party. When it emerged on the party’s website, Unpixelated, that Armansky was an Arab — which incidentally he was not at all, although it was true that he was occasionally called “the Arab” in jest — there was an explosion in the posted comments. Hundreds of anonymous writers said that’s what happens “when you let coons supply your technology” and Armansky took it very badly, especially when the trolling affected his family.
But then suddenly, as if by magic, all those posts were no longer anonymous. You could see the names and addresses of those responsible, their job titles and how old they were. It was beautifully neat — as if they had all filled in a form. You could say that the entire site had been unpixelated, and of course it became clear that the posts did not just come from crackpots, but also from many established citizens, even some of Armansky’s competitors in the security business, and for a long time the hitherto-anonymous perpetrators were completely powerless. They could not understand what had happened. Eventually someone managed to close the site down. But nobody had any idea who lay behind the attack — except for Dragan Armansky himself.
“It was classic Salander,” he said. “You know, I hadn’t heard from her for ages and was convinced that she couldn’t give a damn about me, or anybody else for that matter. But then this happened, and it was fantastic. She had stood up for me. I sent an effusive thanks by email, and to my surprise an answer came back. Do you know what she wrote?”
“No.”
“Just one single sentence: ‘How the hell can you protect that creep Sandvall at the Östermalm clinic?’”
“And who’s Sandvall?”
“A plastic surgeon to whom we gave personal protection because he’d been threatened. He’d pawed a young Estonian woman on whom he had performed breast surgery and she happened to be the girlfriend of a known criminal.”
“Oops.”
“Precisely. Not such a clever thing to do. I answered Salander to say that I didn’t think Sandvall was one of God’s little angels any more than she did. But I pointed out that we don’t have the right to make that kind of judgement. Even male chauvinist pigs are entitled to some degree of security. Since Sandvall was under serious threat and asked for our help, we gave it to him — at double the usual rate.”
“But Salander didn’t buy your argument?”
“Well, she didn’t reply — at least not by email. But I suppose you could say she gave a different sort of answer.”
“What do you mean?”
“She marched up to our guards at the clinic and ordered them to keep calm. I think she even gave them my regards. Then she walked straight past all the patients and nurses and doctors, went into Sandvall’s office and broke three of his fingers. Then she made the most terrifying threats against him.”
“Jesus!”
“That’s putting it mildly. Stark staring mad. I mean, to do something like that in front of so many witnesses, and in a doctor’s office to boot. And of course there was a huge fuss afterwards — a lot of brouhaha about lawsuits and prosecutions and the whole damn thing. You can just imagine: breaking the fingers of a surgeon who’s lined up to perform a string of lucrative nips and tucks... It’s the kind of thing that gets top lawyers seeing dollar signs everywhere.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. It all came to nothing, apparently because the surgeon himself didn’t want to take things any further. But still, Mikael, it was insane. No person in their right mind steams into a top surgeon’s office in broad daylight and breaks his fingers. Not even Salander.”
Blomkvist actually thought that it sounded pretty logical, according to Salander logic, that is, a subject in which he was more or less expert. He did not doubt for one second that that doctor had done far worse than grope the wrong girlfriend. But even so he could not help wondering if Salander hadn’t screwed up in this case, if only on the score of risk analysis.
It occurred to him that she might have wanted to get into trouble again, maybe to put some spice back into her life. But that was probably unfair. He knew nothing of her motives or her current life. As the storm rattled the windowpanes and he sat there in front of his computer Googling Frans Balder, he tried to see beauty in the fact that they had now bumped into each other in this indirect way. It would seem that Salander was the same as ever and perhaps — who knows? — she had given him a story. Linus Brandell had irritated him from the word go. But when Salander dropped into the story, he saw it all with new eyes. If she had taken the time to help Frans Balder then he could at least take a closer look at it, and with some luck find out a bit more about Salander at the same time.
Why had she got herself involved in the first place?
She was not just some itinerant I.T. consultant after all. Yes, she could fly into a rage over life’s injustices, but for a woman who had no qualms about hacking to get indignant about a computer breach, that was a little bit surprising. Breaking the fingers of a plastic surgeon, fine! But hackers? That was very much like throwing stones in glass houses.
There must be some backstory. Maybe she and Balder knew each other. It was not inconceivable and so he tried Googling their names together, but without getting any hits, at least none that had any relevance.
He focused on Frans Balder. The professor’s name generated two million hits but most of them were scientific articles and commentaries. It did not seem as if Balder gave interviews, and because of that, there was a sort of mythological gloss over all of the details of his life — as if they had been romanticized by admiring students.
Apparently it had been assumed that Balder was more or less mentally disabled as a child until one day he walked into the headmaster’s office at his school on Ekerö island and pointed out a mistake in the ninth-grade maths book to do with so-called imaginary numbers. The mistake was corrected in subsequent editions and the following spring Balder won a national mathematics competition. He was reported as being able to speak backwards and create his own long palindromes. In an early school essay which was later published on the net he took a critical view of H.G. Wells’ novel The War of the Worlds on the grounds that he could not understand how beings superior to us in every way could fail to grasp something so basic as the differences between the bacterial flora on Mars and on Earth.
After graduating from secondary school he studied computer sciences at Imperial College in London and defended his thesis on algorithms in neural networks, which was considered revolutionary. He became the youngest ever professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. These days he was regarded as a world authority on the hypothetical concept of “technological singularity”, the state at which computer intelligence will have overtaken our own.
In most photographs he looked like a dishevelled troll with small eyes, his hair standing on end. Yet he married the glamorous actress Hanna Lind. The couple had a son who, according to evening newspaper coverage, under the headline HANNA’S GREAT SORROW, was mentally disabled, even though the boy did not — at least not in the picture accompanying the article — look in the least bit impaired. The marriage fell apart and, amidst a heated custody battle in Nacka district court, the enfant terrible of the theatre, Lasse Westman, stepped into the fray to declare aggressively that Balder should not be allowed to look after his son at all because he cared more about “the intelligence of computers than that of children”. Blomkvist concentrated his efforts on trying to understand Balder’s research, and for a long time he sat engrossed in a complicated text about quantum processors in computers.
Afterwards he went into Documents and opened a file he had created a year or so earlier. It was called LISBETH STUFF. He had no idea whether she was still hacking into his computer, but he could not help hoping that she did and wondered if he should not after all type out a little greeting. Long, personal letters were not her thing. He would do better to go for something brisk and a little bit cryptic. He wrote:
Chapter 5
The words blinked onto the computer screen:
Plague gave a hoarse, almost deranged yell, and that may have been unwise. But even if the neighbours had happened to hear, they could not have dreamed what it was about. Plague’s home was not an obvious setting for high-level international security coups.
It felt more like a place where a social welfare case might hang out. Plague lived on Högklintavägen in Sundbyberg, a markedly unglamorous area with dull, four-storey, faded brick houses, and the apartment itself had nothing much going for it. It had a sour, stale smell, and his desk was covered in all sorts of rubbish, McDonald’s containers and Coca-Cola cans, crumpled-up pages from notebooks, unwashed coffee cups and empty sweet packets. Even though some had actually made it into the wastepaper basket — which had not been emptied for weeks — you could hardly take a step in the room without getting crumbs or grit under your feet. But none of this would have surprised anyone who knew him.
Plague was not a man who normally showered or changed his clothes much. He spent his whole life in front of the computer, even when he was not working: a giant of a man and overweight, bloated and unkempt, with an attempt at an imperial beard that had long since turned into a shapeless thicket. His posture was dreadful and he had a habit of groaning when he moved. But the man had other talents.
He was a wizard on the computer, a hacker who flew unconstrained through cyberspace and was probably second only to one person in the field, a woman in this particular case. The mere sight of his fingers dancing across the keyboard was a joy to behold. He was as light and nimble on the net as he was heavy and clumsy in the other, more material world, and as a neighbour somewhere upstairs, presumably Herr Jansson, now banged on the floor, he answered the message he had received:
Then he leaned back with a delighted smile and tried to run through in his mind the sequence of events, savouring the triumph for a little while longer before going on to pump Wasp for every detail, and to ensure that she had covered her tracks. No-one must be able to trace them, no-one!
This was not the first time they had been messing with a powerful organization. But this was on a new level, and many in Hacker Republic, the exclusive fellowship to which she belonged, had actually been against the idea, Wasp herself most of all. Wasp could take on just about any authority or person you could care to name, if it were necessary. But she did not like to pick a fight for its own sake.
She disliked that sort of childish hacker nonsense. She was not someone who hacked into supercomputers merely to show off. Wasp wanted to have a clear objective, and she always damn well analyzed the potential consequences. She weighed long-term risks against whatever need was being satisfied in the short-term, and from that point of view it could not be said it made sense to hack into the N.S.A. Still, she let herself be talked into it. Nobody could quite understand why.
Maybe she was bored and wanted to stir up a little chaos so as not to die of tedium. Or else, as some in the group claimed, she was already in conflict with the N.S.A. and therefore the breach amounted to little more than her personal revenge. But others in the group questioned even that and maintained she was looking for information, that she had been on the hunt for something ever since her father, Alexander Zalachenko, had been murdered at Sahlgrenska hospital in Göteborg.
But nobody knew for sure. Wasp had always had her secrets and actually her motives were unimportant, or so they tried to persuade themselves. If she was prepared to help then they should just accept gratefully and not worry about the fact that, to begin with, she had not shown much enthusiasm, or hardly any feelings at all in fact. At least she was no longer being awkward about it, and that seemed as much as anyone could hope for.
They knew better than most that the N.S.A. had outrageously overstepped its boundaries in recent years. These days the organization did not confine itself to eavesdropping on terrorists and potential security risks, or even just foreign heads of state and other powerful figures, but listened in on everything, or nearly everything. Millions, billions, trillions of communications and activities on the net were spied on and archived, and with each passing day the N.S.A. went further and further and pried deeper and deeper into every private life, and had become one immeasurable, watchful, evil eye.
It was true that nobody in Hacker Republic could claim the moral high ground here. Every single one of them had made their way into parts of the digital landscape where they had no business being. Those were the rules of the game, so to speak. A hacker was someone who crossed the line, for better or for worse, someone who by virtue of their occupation broke rules and broadened the frontiers of their knowledge, without always being concerned about the distinction between private and public.
But they were not without ethics and above all they knew, also from their own experience, how power corrupts, especially power without control. None of them liked the thought that the worst, most unscrupulous hacking was no longer carried out by solitary rebels or outlaws, but by state behemoths who wanted to control their populations. Plague and Trinity and Bob the Dog and Flipper and Zod and Cat and the whole Hacker Republic gang had therefore decided to strike back by hacking the N.S.A. and messing with them in one way or another.
That was no simple task. It was a little bit like stealing the gold from Fort Knox, and like the arrogant idiots they were they did not content themselves with breaking into the system. They also wanted superuser status, or “Root” in Linux language, and for that they needed to find unknown vulnerabilities in the system, for what was called a Zero-day attack — first on the N.S.A.’s server platform and then further into the organization’s intranet, NSANet, from which the authority’s signals surveillance went out across the world.
They began as usual with a little social engineering. They had to get hold of the names of systems administrators and infrastructure analysts who held the complex passwords for the intranet. It would not do any harm either if there was a chance that some careless oaf was being negligent about security routines. In fact through their own contacts they came up with four or five names, among them a Richard Fuller.
Fuller worked in the N.I.S.I.R.T., the N.S.A. Information Systems Incident Response Team, which supervised the intranet, and he was constantly on the lookout for leaks and infiltrators. Fuller was a decent sort of fellow — a Harvard law graduate, Republican, former quarterback, a dream patriot if one were to believe his C.V. But through a former lover Bob the Dog managed to discover that he was also bipolar, and possibly a cocaine addict.
When he got excited he would do all sorts of stupid things, such as opening files and documents without first putting them in a so-called sandbox, a required security protocol. Furthermore he was very handsome, though a little smarmy, and someone, probably Bob the Dog himself, came up with the idea that Wasp should travel to his home town in Baltimore, go to bed with him and catch him in a honey trap.
Wasp told them all to go to hell.
She also rejected their next idea, that they would compile a document containing information which looked like dynamite, specifically about infiltrators and leaks at head office in Fort Meade. This would then be infected with malware containing an advanced Trojan with a high level of originality which Plague and Wasp were to develop. The plan was to put out leads on the net which would lure Fuller to the file, and with a bit of luck get him so worked up that he would be careless with security. Not a bad plan at all — it could take them into the N.S.A.’s computer system without an active breach that might be traceable.
Wasp said that she was not going to sit around waiting for that blockhead Fuller to put his foot in it. She did not want to have to rely on other people making mistakes and was being generally contrary and bloody-minded, so no-one was surprised when she suddenly wanted to take over the whole operation herself. Even though there was a certain amount of protest, in the end they all gave in, but not without issuing a series of instructions. Wasp did carefully write down the names and details of the systems administrators which they had managed to obtain, and she did ask for help with the so-called fingerprinting: the mapping of the server platform and operating system. But after that she closed the door on Hacker Republic and the world, and Plague had no reason to think that she paid any attention to his advice, for example that she should not use her handle, her alias, and that she should not work from home but rather from some remote hotel under a false identity, in case the N.S.A.’s bloodhounds managed to track her down. Needless to say, she did everything her own way and all Plague could do was sit at his desk in Sundbyberg and wait, his nerves in tatters. Which is why he still had no idea how she had gone about it.
He knew one thing for certain: what she had achieved was legendary, and while the storm howled outside he pushed aside some of the rubbish on his desk, leaned forward and typed on his computer:
Empty.
That was how it felt. Salander had hardly slept for a week and she had probably also had too little to drink and eat, and now her head ached and her eyes were bloodshot and her hands shook and what she wanted above all was to sweep all of her equipment to the floor. In one sense she was content, though hardly for the reason Plague or anyone else in Hacker Republic would have guessed. She was content because she had been able to get some new information on the criminal group she was mapping out; she had found evidence of a connection which she had previously only suspected. But she kept that to herself, and she was surprised that the others could have imagined that she would have hacked the system for the hell of it.
She was no hormone-fuelled teenager, no idiot show-off looking for a kick. She would only embark on such a bold venture because she was after something very specific, although it was true that once upon a time hacking had been more than just a tool for her. During the worst moments of her childhood it had been her way of escaping, a way to make life feel a little less boxed in. With the help of computers she could break through barriers which had been put in her way and experience periods of freedom. There was probably an element of that in the current situation too.
First and foremost she was on the hunt and had been ever since she woke up in the light of early dawn with her dream of that fist beating rhythmically, relentlessly on a mattress on Lundagatan. Her enemies were hiding behind smokescreens and this could be the reason why Salander had been unusually difficult and awkward of late. It was as if a new darkness emanated from her. Apart from a large, loudmouthed boxing coach called Obinze and two or three lovers of both sexes, she saw hardly anyone. More than ever she looked like trouble; her hair was straggly, her eyes threatening, and even though she sometimes made an effort she had not become any more fluent at small talk.
She spoke the truth or said nothing at all, and as for her apartment here on Fiskargatan... that was a story in itself. It was big enough for a family with seven children, although in the years since she had acquired the place nothing had been done to decorate it or make it homely. There were only a few pieces of Ikea furniture, placed seemingly at random, and she did not even have a stereo system, perhaps because she did not understand music. She saw more melody in a differential equation than in a piece by Beethoven. Yet she was as rich as Croesus. The money she had stolen from that crook Hans-Erik Wennerström had grown to a little more than five billion kronor, so she could afford whatever she wanted. But in some way — which was typical of her — her fortune had not made any mark on her personality, unless perhaps it had made her yet more fearless. She had certainly done some increasingly drastic things of late.
She may have crossed a line by wandering into N.S.A.’s intranet. But she had judged it necessary, and for several days and nights she had been totally absorbed. Now it was over she peered out of tired, squinting eyes at her two work desks, set at right angles. Her equipment consisted of the regular computer and the test machine she had bought, on which she had installed a copy of N.S.A.’s server and operating system.
She had run her own fuzzing program, which searched for errors and tiny vulnerabilities in the platform against the test computer. She then followed that up with debugging and black-box penetration testing and various beta test attacks. The outcome of all that formed the basis of her toolkit, including her R.A.T., so she could not afford to neglect a single point. She was scrutinizing the system from top to bottom and that was why she had installed a copy of the server here at home. If she had set to work on the real platform, the N.S.A. technicians would have noticed it immediately.
This way she was able to work on without distraction, day after day, and if she did happen to leave the computer then it was only to doze off for a while on the sofa or to put a pizza in the microwave. Apart from that she kept at it until her eyes hurt, especially with her Zero-day Exploit, the software which exploited the unknown security vulnerabilities and which would update her status once she had actually got in. It was completely mind-boggling. Salander had written a program which not only gave her ownership over the system, but also the power to control remotely pretty much anything on an intranet of which she had only patchy knowledge. That was the most extraordinary part.
She was not just going to break in. She was going further, into NSANet, which was a self-contained universe barely connected to the ordinary net. She might look like a teenager who had failed all of her subjects at school, but give her source codes in computer programs and a logical context and her brain just went click, click. What she had created was nothing less than wholly new and improved malware, an advanced Trojan with a life of its own.
She found the pay-as-you-go card she had bought from T-Mobile in Berlin and put it into her telephone. Then she used it to go onto the net. Maybe she should have been far away in another part of the world, dressed up as her alter ego, Irene Nesser.
If the security people at the N.S.A. were diligent and on top of things, they just might be able to trace her to Telenor’s base station here in the block. They would not get all the way through, at least not with the technology now available, but it would still be close and that would be very bad news. Yet she reckoned the advantages of sitting here at home outweighed the risk, and she did take all the security precautions she could. Like so many other hackers, she used Tor, a network by which her traffic bounced about among thousands and thousands of users. But she also knew that not even Tor was watertight — the N.S.A. used a program called EgotisticalGiraffe to crack the system — so she spent a long time further improving her own personal security. Only then did she go on the attack.
She sliced into the platform like a blade through paper, but she could not afford to become overconfident as a result. Now, quickly, she had to locate the systems administrators whose names she had been given and inject her Trojan into one of their files, thereby creating a bridge between the server network and the intranet, none of which was simple, not by any means. No warning bells or anti-virus programs must be allowed to start ringing. In the end she used the identity of a man called Tom Breckinridge to penetrate NSANet and then... every muscle in her body tensed. Before her eyes, her overworked, sleepless eyes, the magic unfolded.
Her Trojan took her further and further in, into this, the most secret of the secret, and she knew exactly where she was going. She was on her way to Active Directory — or its equivalent — to upgrade her status. She would go from unwelcome little visitor to superuser in this teeming universe, and only once that was done would she try to get some sort of overview of the system. It wasn’t easy. It was more or less impossible, in fact, and she did not have much time either.
She worked fast to get a grip on the search system and to pick up all the passwords and expressions and references, all the internal gibberish. She was on the point of giving up when finally she found a document marked TOP SECRET, NOFORN — no foreign distribution — not particularly remarkable in itself. But together with a couple of communications links between Zigmund Eckerwald at Solifon and cyber-agents at the Department for the Protection of Strategic Technologies at the N.S.A., it turned into dynamite. She smiled and memorized every little detail. Then she caught sight of yet another document that seemed relevant. It was encrypted and she saw no alternative but to copy it, even if that would set alarm bells ringing at Fort Meade. She swore ferociously.
The situation was becoming critical. Besides, she had to get on with her official assignment, if official was the right word. She had solemnly promised Plague and the others at Hacker Republic to pull down the N.S.A.’s trousers, so she tried to work out who she should be communicating with. Who was to get her message?
She settled for Edwin Needham, Ed the Ned. His name invariably came up in connection with I.T. security, and as she quickly picked up some information about him on the intranet, she felt a grudging respect. Needham was a star. But she had outwitted him and for a moment she thought twice about giving the game away.
Her attack would create an uproar. But an uproar was exactly what she was looking for, so she went ahead. She had no idea what time it was. It could have been night or day, autumn or spring, and only vaguely, deep in her consciousness, was she aware that the storm over the city was building up, as if the weather was synchronized with her coup. In distant Maryland, Needham began to write his email.
He didn’t get far, because in the next second she took over his sentence and wrote:
It was a thrilling experience, no question, and yet... when she disconnected and all her log files were automatically deleted, then came the hangover. It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner, and those sentences that had seemed so absolutely right a few seconds ago began to sound increasingly childish and more and more like the usual hacker nonsense. Suddenly she longed to drink herself into oblivion. With tired, shuffling steps she went into the kitchen and fetched a bottle of Tullamore Dew and two or three beers to rinse her mouth with, and sat down at her computers and drank. Not in celebration. There was no sense of victory left in her body. Instead there was... well, what? Defiance perhaps.
She drank and drank while the storm roared and congratulatory whoops came streaming in from Hacker Republic. But none of it touched her now. She hardly had the strength to stay upright and with a wide, hasty movement she swept her hand across the desktops and watched with indifference as bottles and ashtrays crashed to the floor. Then she thought about Mikael Blomkvist.
It must have been the alcohol. Blomkvist had a way of popping up in her thoughts, as old flames do, when she was drunk, and without quite realizing what she was doing she hacked into his computer. She still had a shortcut into his system — it was not the N.S.A., after all — and at first she wondered what she was doing there.
Could she care less about him? He was history, just an attractive idiot she had once happened to fall in love with, and she was not going to make that mistake again. She’d much rather get out of there and not look at another computer for weeks. Yet she stayed on his server and in the next moment her face lit up. Kalle Bloody Blomkvist had created a file called LISBETH STUFF and in that document there was a question for her:
She gave a slight smile, in spite of it all, and that was partly because of Frans Balder. He was her kind of computer nerd, passionate about source codes and quantum processors and the potential of logic. But mostly she was smiling at the fact that Blomkvist had stumbled into the very same situation she was in, and though she debated for some time whether to simply shut down and go to bed, she wrote back:
And what happens, Blomkvist, if we create a machine which is a little bit cleverer than we are?>
Then she went into one of her bedrooms and collapsed with her clothes on.
Chapter 6
Despite his best intentions to be a full-time father, and in spite of the intense moment of hope and emotion on Hornsgatan, Frans Balder had sunk back into that deep concentration which could be mistaken for anger. Now his hair was standing on end and his upper lip was shiny with sweat. It was at least three days since he had shaved or taken a shower. He was even grinding his teeth. For hours the world and the storm outside had ceased to exist for him, and he even failed to notice what was going on at his feet. They were small, awkward movements, as if a cat or an animal had crept in under his legs; it was a while before he realized that August was crawling around under his desk. Balder gave him a dazed look, as if the stream of programming codes still lay like a film over his eyes.
“What are you after?”
August looked up at him with a pleading, clear look in his eyes.
“What?” Balder said. “What?” and then something happened.
The boy picked up a piece of paper covered in quantum algorithms which was lying on the floor and feverishly moved his hand back and forth over it. For a moment Balder thought the boy was about to have another attack. But no, it was rather as if August were pretending to write. Balder felt his body go tense and again he was reminded of something important and remote, the same feeling as at the crossing on Hornsgatan. But this time he understood what it was.
He thought back to his own childhood, when numbers and equations had been more important than life itself. His spirits rose and he burst out, “You want to do sums, don’t you? Of course, you want to do sums!” and the next moment he hurried off to fetch some pens and ruled A4 paper which he put on the floor in front of August.
Then he wrote down the simplest series of numbers he could think of, Fibonacci’s sequence, in which every number is the sum of the preceding two, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and left a space for the next number — 34. Then it occurred to him that this was likely too simple, so he also wrote down a geometric sequence: 2, 6, 18, 54... in which every number is multiplied by three and the next number should therefore be 162. To solve a problem like that, he thought, a gifted child would not need a great deal of prior knowledge. Balder slipped into a daydream that the boy was not disabled at all, rather an enhanced copy of himself; he, too, had been slow to speak and interact socially, but he had understood mathematical relationships long before he uttered his first word.
He sat beside the boy for a long time and waited. But nothing happened. August just stared at the numbers with his glassy look. In the end Balder left him alone, went upstairs and drank some fizzy water, and then settled down again at the kitchen table to continue to work. But now his concentration was gone and he began absent-mindedly to flick through the latest issue of the New Scientist. After half an hour or so he went back downstairs to August, who was still sitting on his heels in the same immobile posture in which he had left him. Then Balder noticed something intriguing.
A second later he had the sense of being confronted by something totally inexplicable.
Hanna Balder was standing in the kitchen on Torsgatan smoking a filterless Prince. She had on a blue dressing gown and worn grey slippers, and although her hair was thick and beautiful and she was still attractive, she looked haggard. Her lip was swollen and the heavy make-up around her eyes was not there purely for aesthetic reasons. Hanna Balder had taken another beating.
It would be wrong to say that she was used to it. No-one gets used to that sort of abuse. But it was part of her everyday existence and she could scarcely remember the happy person she once had been. Fear had become a natural element of her personality and for some time now she had been smoking sixty cigarettes a day and taking tranquillizers.
She had known for a while that Westman regretted having been so generous to Frans. In fact it had been a mystery from the start. Westman had been relying on the money Balder sent them for August. For long periods they had been living off it and often he would make Hanna write an email full of lies about unforeseen expenses for some educational expert or remedial therapy, which obviously the funds had never gone anywhere near. That’s what made it so odd. Why had he given up all of that and let Balder take the boy away?
Deep down Hanna knew the answer. It was hubris brought on by alcohol. It was the promise of a part in a new detective series on T.V.4 which had boosted his confidence still further. But most of all it was August. Westman found the boy creepy and weird, even though to Hanna that was incomprehensible. How could anyone detest August?
He sat on the floor with his puzzles and did not bother anyone. Yet he had that strange look which was turned inwards rather than outwards, which usually made people smile and say that the boy must have a rich inner life, but which got under Westman’s skin.
“Jesus, Hanna! He’s looking straight through me,” he would burst out.
“But you say that he’s just an idiot.”
“He is an idiot, but there’s something funny about him all the same. I think he hates me.”
That was nonsense, nothing more. August did not even look at Westman or at anyone else for that matter, and he surely did not have it in him to hate anybody. The world out there disturbed him and he was happiest inside his own bubble. But Westman in his drunken ravings believed that the boy was plotting something, and that must have been the reason he let August and the money slip out of their lives. Pathetic. That at least was how Hanna had interpreted it. But now, as she stood there by the sink smoking her cigarette so furiously and nervously that she got tobacco on her tongue, she wondered if there had not been something in it after all. Maybe August did hate Westman. Maybe he did want to punish him for all the punches he had taken, and maybe... Hanna closed her eyes and bit her lip... the boy hated her too.
She had started having these feelings of self-loathing ever since, at night, she was overcome by an almost unbearable sense of longing and wondered whether she and Westman might not actually have damaged August.
It was not the fact that August had filled in the right answers to the numerical sequences. That sort of thing did not particularly impress a man like Balder. No, it was something he saw lying next to the numbers. At first sight it looked like a photograph or a painting, but it was in fact a drawing, an exact representation of the traffic light on Hornsgatan which they had passed the other evening. It was exquisitely captured, in the minutest detail, with a sort of mathematical precision.
There was a glow to it. No-one had taught August anything at all about three-dimensional drawing or how an artist works with shadow and light, yet he seemed to have a perfect mastery of the techniques. The red eye of the traffic light flashed towards them and Hornsgatan’s autumn darkness closed around it, and in the middle of the street you could see the man whom Balder had noticed and vaguely recognized. The man’s head was cut off above the eyebrows. He looked frightened or at least uncomfortable and troubled, as if August had disconcerted him, and he was walking unsteadily, though goodness knows how the boy had managed to capture that.
“My God,” Balder said. “Did you do this?”
August neither nodded nor shook his head but looked over towards the window, and Balder had the strangest feeling that his life would never be the same again.
Hanna Balder needed to do some shopping. The refrigerator was empty. Lasse could come home at any moment and he would not be happy if there was not even a beer for him. But the weather outside looked ghastly so she put it off, and instead she sat in the kitchen smoking, even though it was bad for her skin and bad in general.
She scrolled through her contacts two, three times, in the hope that a new name would come up. But of course there were only the same old people, and they were all tired of her. Against her better judgement she called Mia. Mia was her agent and once upon a time they had been best friends and dreamed of conquering the world together. These days Hanna was Mia’s guilty conscience and she had lost count of all her excuses. “It’s not easy for an actress to grow older, blah, blah.” Why not just say it straight out?: “You look worn out, Hanna. The public doesn’t love you any more.”
But Mia did not answer and that was probably just as well. The conversation would not have done either of them any good. Hanna could not help looking into August’s room just to feel that stinging sense of loss which made her realize that she had failed in her life’s most important mission — motherhood. In some perverse way she took comfort in her self-pity, and she was standing there wondering whether she shouldn’t go out and get some beer after all when the telephone rang.
It was Frans. She made a face. All day she had been tempted — but did not dare — to call him to say that she wanted August back, not just because she missed the boy, still less because she thought her son would be better off with her. It was simply in order to avoid a disaster.
Lasse wanted to get the child support again. God knows what would happen, she thought, if he were to turn up in Saltsjöbaden to claim his rights. He might even drag August out of the house, scare him out of his wits and beat Frans to a pulp. She would have to warn him. But when she picked up and tried to say that to Frans, it was impossible to get a word in edgeways. He just went on and on about some strange story which was apparently “totally fantastic and completely amazing” and all that sort of thing.
“I’m sorry, Frans, I don’t understand. What are you talking about?” she said.
“August is a savant. He’s a genius.”
“Have you gone mad?”
“Quite the opposite, my love, I’ve come to my senses at last. You have to get over here, yes, really, right now! I think it’s the only way. You won’t be able to understand otherwise. I’ll pay for the taxi. I promise, you’ll flip out. He must have a photographic memory, you see? And in some incomprehensible way he must have picked up the secrets of perspective drawing all by himself. It’s so beautiful, Hanna, so precise. It shines with a light from another world.”
“What shines?”
“His traffic light. Weren’t you listening? The one we passed the other evening — he’s been drawing a whole series of perfect pictures of it, actually more than perfect...”
“More than...”
“Well, how can I put it? He hasn’t just copied it, Hanna, not just captured it exactly, he’s also added something, an artistic dimension. There’s such a strange fervour in what he’s done, and paradoxically enough also something mathematical, as if he even has some understanding of axonometry.”
“Axo...?”
“Never mind! You have to come here and see,” he said, and gradually she began to understand.
Out of the blue August had started to draw like a virtuoso, or so Frans claimed, and that would of course be fantastic if it were true. But the sad thing was that Hanna was still not happy, and at first she could not understand why. Then it dawned on her. It was because it had happened at Frans’ house. The fact was, the boy had been living with her and Lasse for years and absolutely nothing like this had happened. He had sat there with his puzzles and building blocks and not uttered a word, just having those unpleasant fits when he screamed with that piercing voice and thrashed backwards and forwards. Now, hey presto, a few weeks with Pappa and he was a genius.
It was too much. Not that she was not happy for August. But still, it hurt, and the worst thing was: she was not as surprised as she should have been. On the contrary, it felt as if she had almost seen it coming; not that the boy would draw accurate reproductions of traffic lights, but that there was something more beneath the surface.
She had sensed it in his eyes, in that look which, when he was excited, seemed to register every little detail of his surroundings. She had sensed it in the way the boy listened to his teachers, and the nervous way he leafed through the maths books she had bought for him, and most of all she had sensed it in his numbers. There was nothing so strange as those numbers. Hour after hour he would write down series of incomprehensibly large sums, and Hanna really did try to understand them, or at least to grasp the point of it all. But however hard she tried she had not been able to work it out, and now she supposed that she had missed something important. She had been too unhappy and wrapped up in herself to fathom what was going on in her son’s mind, wasn’t that it?
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Don’t know what,” Frans said in irritation.
“I don’t know if I can come,” she said, and at the same time she heard a racket at the front door.
Lasse was coming in with his old drinking buddy Roger Winter, and that made her flinch in fear, mutter an apology to Frans and for the thousandth time dwell on the fact that she was a bad mother.
Balder stood on the chequered floor in the bedroom, the telephone in his hand, and swore. He had had the floor laid because it appealed to his sense of mathematical order, with the squares repeating themselves endlessly in the wardrobe mirrors on either side of the bed. There were days when he saw the multiplication of the squares reflected there as a teeming riddle, something with a life of its own rising up out of the schematic in the same way that thoughts and dreams arise from neurons or computer programs emerge from binary codes. But just then he was lost in quite different thoughts.
“Dear boy. What has become of your mother?” he said aloud.
August, who was sitting on the floor beside him eating a cheese and gherkin sandwich, looked up with a concentrated expression, and Balder was seized by a strange premonition that he was about to say something grown up and wise. But that was obviously idiotic. August remained as silent as ever and knew nothing about women who were neglected and had faded away. The fact that the idea had even occurred to Balder was of course due to the drawings.
The drawings — by now there had been three — seemed to him to be proof not only of artistic and mathematical gifts, but also of some sort of wisdom. The works seemed so mature and complex in their geometric precision that Balder could not reconcile them with August’s mental limitations. Or rather, he did not want to reconcile them, because he had long ago worked out what this was about.
As the father of an autistic son Balder had long suspected that many parents hoped the notion of a savant would be their consolation prize to make up for a diagnosis of cognitive deficiencies. But the odds were against them.
According to a common estimate, only one in ten children with autism has some kind of savant gift, and for the most part these talents, though they often entail a fantastic memory and observation of detail, are not as startling as those depicted in films. There are, for example, autistic people who can say on which day of the week a certain date falls, within a range of several hundred years — in extreme cases within a range of forty thousand years.
Others possess encyclopaedic knowledge within a narrow field, such as bus timetables or telephone numbers. Some can calculate large sums in their heads, or remember what the weather had been like every day of their lives, or are able to tell the time to the second without looking at a watch. There are all kinds of more or less remarkable talents and, from what Balder gathered, people with these skills are called talented savants and capable of quite outstanding accomplishments given the fact that they are otherwise handicapped.
Another far less common group is where Balder hoped that August belonged: the so-called prodigious savants, individuals whose talents are sensational whichever way one looks at them. Kim Peek, for example, who was the inspiration for “Rain Man”. Kim was severely mentally disabled and could not even get dressed by himself. Yet he had memorized twelve thousand books and could give a lightning-quick answer to almost any factual question. He was known as Kimputer.
Or Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic English boy who was extremely withdrawn as a child and uttered his first word when he was six — it happened to be “paper”. By the age of seven Stephen was able to draw groups of buildings perfectly and in the minutest detail, having seen them for just one brief moment. He was flown above London in a helicopter and when he landed he drew the entire city in a fantastic, dizzying panorama, and with a wonderfully individual touch.
If Balder understood it all correctly, he and August must have looked at that traffic light in very different ways. Not only because the boy was plainly so much more focused, but also because Balder’s brain had instantly eliminated all non-essential elements in order to concentrate on the traffic light’s key message: go or stop. In all probability his perception was also clouded by his thinking about Farah Sharif, while for August the crossing must have appeared exactly as it was, in precise detail.
Afterwards he had taken the image away with him like a fine etching, and it was not until a few weeks later that he had felt the need to express it. The strangest thing of all was, he had done more than simply reproduce the traffic light and the man. He had charged them with a disquieting light, and Balder could not rid himself of the thought that August had wanted to say something more to him than: Look what I can do! For the hundredth time he stared at the drawings and it was as if a needle had gone into his heart.
It frightened him. He did not entirely understand it. But there was something about that man. His eyes were bright and hard. His jaw was tense and his lips strangely thin, almost non-existent, although that could hardly be held against him. Still, the longer he stared at him, the more frightening he looked, and all of a sudden Balder was gripped by an icy fear.
“I love you, my boy,” he murmured, hardly aware of what he was saying, and possibly he repeated the sentence once or twice because the words began to sound increasingly unfamiliar to his ears.
He realized with a new sort of pain that he had never uttered them before, and once he had recovered from the first shock it occurred to him that there was something contemptible in that. Did it take an exceptional talent to make him love his own child? It would be only too typical, if so. All his life he had had an absolute obsession with achievement.
He had never bothered with anything which was not innovative or highly skilled, and when he left Sweden for Silicon Valley he had hardly given a thought to August. Basically his son was no more than an irritant in the scheme of brilliant discoveries which Balder himself was busy making.
But now, he promised himself, things would be different. He would set aside his research and everything that had tormented him these last few months, and devote his whole attention to the boy.
He would become a new person.
Chapter 7
Something else had happened at the magazine, something bad. But Berger did not want to give any details over the telephone. She suggested coming round to his place. Blomkvist had tried to put her off:
“You’re going to freeze that beautiful bum of yours!”
Berger had paid no attention and, but for the tone in her voice, he would have been happy that she was so stubborn. Ever since he left the office he had been longing to speak to her, and maybe even pull her into the bedroom and tear all her clothes off. But something told him this was not going to happen now. She had sounded upset and mumbled, “I’m sorry,” and this only made him more worried.
“I’ll get a taxi right away,” she said.
It was a while before she appeared, and out of boredom he went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. He had certainly seen better days. His hair was dishevelled and needed a cut and he had bags under his eyes. That was basically Elizabeth George’s fault. He swore and left the bathroom to set about cleaning up.
That was one thing at least that Berger would not be able to complain about. However long they had known each other, and however interwoven their lives, he still suffered a complex when it came to tidiness. He was a labourer’s son and a bachelor, she the upper-class married woman with the perfect home in Saltsjöbaden. In any case it could do no harm for his place to look a little respectable. He filled the dishwasher, wiped the sink and put out the rubbish.
He even had time to vacuum the living room, water the flowers on the windowsill and tidy up the bookshelf and magazine rack before the doorbell rang. There was both a ring and an impatient knock. When he opened up he was horrified. Berger was frozen stiff.
She shook like a leaf, and not just because of the weather. She was not even wearing a hat. The wind had ruined her neat hairstyle and there was something that looked like a graze on her right cheek, which had not been there that morning.
“Ricky!” he said. “Are you alright?”
“I’ve frozen off that beautiful bum of mine. Couldn’t get a taxi.”
“What happened to your face?”
“I slipped and fell. Three times, I think.”
He looked down at her dark-red high-heeled Italian boots.
“You’ve got perfect snow boots on too.”
“Yes. Ideal. Not to mention my decision to go without thermals this morning. Brilliant!”
“Come on in and I’ll warm you up.”
She fell into his arms and shook even more as he hugged her close.
“I’m sorry,” she said again.
“What for?”
“For everything. For Serner. I’ve been a fool.”
“Don’t exaggerate now, Ricky.”
He brushed the snowflakes from her hair and forehead and took a careful look at her cheek.
“No, no, I’ll tell you everything,” she said.
“But first get your clothes off and climb into a hot bath. Would you like a glass of red?”
She would, and she stayed in the bath for a long while with her glass, which he refilled two or three times. He sat on the lid of the toilet listening to her story, and despite all the ominous news there was something of a reconciliation about their conversation, as if they were steadily breaking through a wall they had lately been building up between them.
“I know you thought I was being a fool right from the start,” she said. “No, don’t argue, I know you too well. But you have to understand that Christer, Malin and I could see no other solution. We had recruited Emil and Sofie, and we were so proud of that. They were just about the hottest reporters around, weren’t they? It was incredibly prestigious for us. It showed that Millennium was on the move and there was a great buzz, with really positive coverage in Resumé and Dagens Media. It was like the good old days, and personally I felt strongly about the fact that I had promised both Sofie and Emil a secure future at the magazine. ‘Our finances are stable,’ I said. ‘We have Harriet Vanger behind us. We’re going to have the money for fantastic, in-depth reporting.’ You know, I really believed it too. But then...”
“Then the sky fell in.”
“Exactly, and it wasn’t just the newspaper crisis, or the collapse of the advertising market. There was also that whole situation at the Vanger Group. I’m not sure you realize what a mess it was. Sometimes I see it almost as a political coup. All those reactionary old men in the family, and women too for that matter — well, you know them better than anyone. The old racists and regressives got together and stabbed Harriet in the back. I’ll never forget that call from her. I’ve been rolled over, she said. Crushed. Of course it was her efforts to revive and modernize the group which had annoyed them, and then her decision to appoint David Goldman to the board, the son of Rabbi Viktor Goldman. But we were also part of the picture, as you know; Andrei had just written his report on beggars in Stockholm, which we all thought was the best thing he’d ever done, and which was quoted everywhere, even abroad. But which the Vanger people—”
“Thought was lefty rubbish.”
“Worse than that, Mikael — propaganda for ‘lazy buggers who can’t even be bothered to get themselves a job’.”
“Is that what they said?”
“Something along those lines. My guess is that the story itself was irrelevant, it was just their excuse, a pretext for further undermining Harriet’s role within the group. They wanted to put a stop to everything that Henrik and Harriet had stood for.”
“Idiots.”
“My God, yes, but that didn’t exactly help us. I remember those days. It was as if the rug had been pulled from under our feet, and I know, I know — I should have involved you more. But I thought that we’d all benefit if we left you to concentrate on your stories.”
“And still I didn’t deliver anything decent.”
“You tried, Mikael, you really tried. But what I’m coming to is that it was then, when it seemed as if we’d hit rock bottom, that Levin rang.”
“Someone had presumably tipped him off about what had happened.”
“Without a doubt, and I don’t even need to tell you that I was sceptical at first. Serner felt like the trashiest sort of tabloid. But Levin gave it the works, with his usual torrent of words, and invited me down to his big new villa in Cannes.”
“What?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, I didn’t tell you that either. I suppose I felt ashamed. But I was going down to the film festival in any case, to do a profile on the Iranian film director. You know, the one being persecuted because she made the documentary about nineteen-year-old Sara, who had been stoned, and I didn’t think it would do any harm if Serner helped us with the travel costs. In any event, Levin and I sat up all night and talked and I remained sceptical. He was absurdly boastful and came on with all this sales talk. But eventually I began to listen to him, and do you know why?”
“He was a fantastic lay?”
“Ha, no, it was his relationship to you.”
“Did he want to sleep with me, then?”
“He has boundless admiration for you.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, Mikael, that’s where you’re wrong. He loves his power and his money and his villa in Cannes. But more than that, it bugs him that he’s not as cool as you. If we’re talking cred, he’s poor and you’re stinking rich. Deep down he wants to be like you, I felt that right away, and, yes, I should have realized that that sort of envy can become dangerous. You do know what the campaign against you is all about, don’t you? Your uncompromising attitude makes people feel pathetic. Your very existence reminds them just how much they’ve sold out, and the more you’re acclaimed, the punier they themselves appear. When it’s like that, the only way they can fight back is by dragging you down. The bullshit gives them back a little bit of dignity — at least that’s what they imagine.”
“Thanks, Erika, but I really couldn’t care less about that campaign.”
“I know, at least I hope that’s right. But what I realized was that Levin really wanted to be in with us, and feel like one of us. He wanted some of our reputation to rub off on him and I thought that was a good incentive. If his ambition was to be cool like you, then it would be devastating for him to turn Millennium into a run-of-the-mill commercial Serner product. If he became known as the man who destroyed one of the most fabled magazines in Sweden, any cred he might still have would be scuppered for good. That’s why I really believed him when he said that both he and the group needed a prestigious magazine, and that he only wanted to help us produce the kind of journalism we believed in. Admittedly he did want to be involved in the magazine, but I put that down to vanity, that he wanted to be able to show off and say to his yuppie friends that he was our spin doctor or something. I never thought he would dare to have a go at the magazine’s soul.”
“And yet that’s precisely what he’s doing now.”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“And where does that leave your fancy psychological theory?”
“I underestimated the power of opportunism. As you saw, Levin and Serner’s behaviour was exemplary before this campaign against you got going, but since then...”
“He’s been taking advantage of it.”
“No, no, somebody else has. Somebody who wanted to get at him. I realized only later that Levin didn’t have an easy time persuading the others to support him in buying a stake in the magazine. As you might imagine, not everybody at Serner suffers from a journalistic inferiority complex. Most of them are just ordinary businessmen; they despise all talk of standing up for things that matter. They were irritated by what they described as Levin’s ‘fake idealism’, and in the campaign against you they saw an opportunity to put the squeeze on him.”
“Dear, oh dear.”
“You have no idea. At first it looked O.K. We were to adapt somewhat to the market, and, as you know, I thought some of that sounded pretty good. I have, after all, spent a fair amount of time wondering how we could reach a younger readership. I really thought that Levin and I were having a productive dialogue so I didn’t worry too much about his presentation today.”
“I noticed that.”
“But that was before all hell broke loose.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The uproar when you sabotaged his presentation.”
“I didn’t sabotage anything, Erika. I just left.”
Berger lay in the bath, took a sip of her wine and then she smiled a wistful smile.
“When will you learn that you’re Mikael Blomkvist?” she said.
“I thought I was beginning to get the hang of that.”
“Apparently not, because otherwise you’d have realized that when Mikael Blomkvist walks out in the middle of a presentation about his own magazine it’s a big deal, whether Mikael Blomkvist intends it to be or not.”
“In that case I apologize for my sabotage.”
“I’m not blaming you, not any more. Now I’m the one saying sorry, as you can see. I’m the one who’s put us in this position. It probably would have gone pear-shaped anyway, whether you’d walked out or not. They were just waiting for an excuse to take a swing at us.”
“What actually happened?”
“After you disappeared we all felt deflated, and Levin, whose self-esteem had taken yet another knock, no longer gave a damn about his presentation. ‘There’s no point,’ he said. He rang his boss to report back, and he probably laid it on a bit thick. I suspect that the envy on which I had been pinning my hopes had changed into something petty and spiteful. He was back again after an hour or so and said that the group was prepared to give Millennium its full backing and use all its channels to market the magazine.”
“You didn’t like the sound of that.”
“No, and I knew before he’d even said one word about it. You could tell by the look on his face. It radiated a mixture of fear and triumph and at first he couldn’t find the right words. He was mostly waffling and said that the group wanted to have more insight into the business, plus content aimed at a younger readership, plus more celebrity news. But then...”
Berger shut her eyes, drew her hand through her wet hair, then knocked back the last of her wine.
“Yes?”
“He said that he wanted you off the editorial team.”
“He what?”
“Of course neither he nor the group could say it straight out, still less could they afford to get headlines like ‘Serner sacks Blomkvist’, so Ove put it neatly by saying that he wanted you to have a freer rein and be allowed to concentrate on what you’re best at: writing reportage. He suggested a strategic relocation to London and a generous stringer arrangement.”
“London?”
“He said that Sweden’s too small for a guy of your calibre, but you get what this is about.”
“They think they can’t push through their changes if I stay on the editorial team?”
“Something like that. Still, I don’t think any of them was surprised when Christer, Malin and I just said no, that it wasn’t even negotiable. Not to mention Andrei’s reaction.”
“What did he do?”
“I’m almost embarrassed to tell you. Andrei stood up and said that it was the most shameful thing he’d heard in his whole life. That you were one of the best things we had in this country, a source of pride for democracy and journalism, and that the whole Serner Group should hang their heads in shame. He said that you were a great man.”
“He does tend to exaggerate.”
“But he’s a good kid.”
“He really is. What did the Serner people do then?”
“Levin was prepared for it, of course. ‘You’re always welcome to buy us out,’ he said. ‘It’s just—’”
“That the price has gone up,” Blomkvist completed the sentence.
“Exactly. He claimed that whichever basis you use for valuing the business would show that any price for Serner’s interest should be at least double what it was when the group went in, given the additional value and goodwill they’ve created.”
“Goodwill! Have they gone mad?”
“Not at all, apparently, but they’re bright, and they want to mess us about. And I wonder if they’re not trying to kill two birds with one stone: pull off a good deal and get rid of a competitor by breaking us financially, all in one go.”
“What the hell should we do?”
“What we’re best at, Mikael: slug it out. I’ll take some of my own money and we’ll buy them out and fight to make this northern Europe’s best magazine.”
“Sure, Erika, but then what? We’ll end up with a lousy financial situation which even you won’t be able to do anything about.”
“I know, but it’ll be O.K. We’ve come through more difficult situations than this. You and I can waive our salaries for a while. We can manage, can’t we?”
“Everything has to end some time, Erika.”
“Don’t say that! Ever!”
“Not even if it’s true?”
“Especially not then.”
“Right.”
“Don’t you have anything in the pipeline?” she said. “Something, anything that will stun Sweden’s media?”
Blomkvist hid his face in his hands and for some reason he thought of Pernilla, his daughter. She had said that unlike him she was going to write “for real”, whatever it was that was not “real” about his writing.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
Berger smacked her hand hard on the bath water so that it splashed out onto his socks.
“Jesus, you must have something. There’s no-one in this country who gets as many tip-offs as you do.”
“Most of it’s junk,” he said. “But maybe... I was just in the process of checking something.”
Berger sat up in the tub.
“What?”
“No, it’s nothing,” he backtracked. “It’s just wishful thinking.”
“In a situation like this we have to think wishfully.”
“Yes, but it’s just a load of smoke and nothing you can prove.”
“Yet there’s something inside you that believes in it, isn’t there?”
“Maybe, but that’s because of one little detail which doesn’t have anything to do with the story itself.”
“What?”
“That my old comrade-in-arms has also been at the story.”
“The one with a capital S?”
“The very one.”
“Well, that does sound promising,” Berger said, and stepped out of the bath, naked and beautiful.
Chapter 8
August was kneeling on the checked floor in the bedroom, looking at a still-life arrangement with a lit candle on a blue plate, two green apples and an orange which his father had set out for him. But nothing was happening. August stared emptily at the storm outside and Balder wondered: Does it make sense to present the boy with a subject?
His son only had to glance at something for it to be embedded in his mind, so why should his father of all people choose what he was supposed to draw? August must have thousands of images of his own in his head. Maybe a plate and some pieces of fruit were as wrong as could be. Once again Balder asked himself: Was the boy trying to convey something in particular with his traffic light? The drawing was no casual little observation. On the contrary, the stop light shone like a baleful glowering eye, and maybe — what did Balder know? — August had felt threatened by the man on that pedestrian crossing.
Balder looked at his son for the umpteenth time that day. It was shameful, wasn’t it? He used to think that August was simply weird and unfathomable. Now he wondered if he and his son were not in actual fact alike. When Balder was young, the doctors did not go in so much for diagnoses. In those days, there was a far greater tendency to dismiss people as being odd. He himself had definitely been different from other children, much too serious — his facial expression never changed — and no-one in the school playground thought he was much fun. Nor did he find the other children particularly entertaining either — he sought refuge in numbers and equations and avoided talking more than he was required to.
He would probably not have been considered autistic in the same sense as August. But nowadays they probably would have stuck an Asperger’s label on him. He and Hanna had believed that the early diagnosis of August would help them, yet so little had been done, and it was only now, now that his son was eight, that Balder discovered the boy had a special mathematical and spatial talent. How come Hanna and Westman had not noticed?
Even if Westman was a bastard, Hanna was fundamentally a sensitive and good person. Balder would never forget their first meeting. It was an evening function of the I.V.A., the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, at Stockholm’s Rådhuset, where he was being given some prize that he cared nothing about. He had spent a boring evening longing to get home to his computer when a beautiful woman whom he vaguely recognized — Balder’s knowledge of the world of celebrity was limited — came up to him and started to talk. Balder still thought of himself as the nerd from Tappström school who got nothing but contemptuous looks from the girls. He could not understand what a woman like Hanna saw in him. At the time — as he was soon to find out — she was at the height of her career. But she seduced him and made love to him that night like no woman had done before. Then followed maybe the happiest time in his life and yet... the binary codes won out over love.
He worked until the marriage fell apart. Lasse Westman arrived on the scene and Hanna went downhill and probably August did as well, which should of course have made Balder wild with fury. But he knew that he too was to blame. He had bought his freedom and not bothered about his son and perhaps what was said during the custody hearing was true, that he had chosen the dream of artificial life over that of his own child. What a monumental idiot he had been.
He got out his laptop and went on Google to learn more about savant skills. He had already ordered a number of books, and in his usual way meant to teach himself everything there was to know. No damn psychologist or educationalist would be able to catch him out and tell him what August needed at this point. He would know that better than any of them and so he continued searching until his attention was caught by the story of an autistic girl called Nadia.
What happened to her was described in Lorna Selfe’s book Nadia: A Case of Extraordinary Drawing Ability in an Autistic Child and in Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Balder read in fascination. It was a gripping story and in many ways there were parallels. Like August, Nadia had seemed perfectly healthy when she was born, and only gradually did her parents realize that something was amiss.
The girl did not start speaking. She did not look people in the eye. She disliked physical contact and did not respond to her mother’s smiles or attempts at communication. She was for the most part quiet and withdrawn and compulsively tore paper into narrow strips. By the time she was six she had still not spoken a word.
Yet she could draw like Leonardo da Vinci. Already at the age of three, and out of the blue, she had begun to draw horses. Unlike other children she did not start with the entire animal, but instead with some little detail — a hoof, a rider’s boot, a tail — and the strangest thing of all was that she drew fast. In a terrific hurry she put together the parts, one here, one there, until she had a perfect whole, a horse which galloped or walked. From his own efforts when he was a teenager Balder knew how exceptionally difficult it is to draw an animal in motion. However hard you try, the result is unnatural or stiff. It takes a master to tease out the lightness in the movements. Nadia was a master already at the age of three.
Her horses were like perfect stills, drawn with a light touch, and obviously not the result of any long training. Her virtuosity burst out like a breaking dam, and that fascinated her contemporaries. How was it possible for her to leapfrog centuries of development in the history of art with just a few quick hand movements? The Australian specialists Allan Snyder and John Mitchell studied the drawings and in 1999 presented a theory, which has gradually won general acceptance, to the effect that we all have an inherited capacity to reach that level of virtuosity, but that in most of us it is blocked.
If we see a football, for example, we do not immediately understand that it is a three-dimensional object. Instead, the brain processes a series of details at lightning speed: the way in which shadows fall and the differences in depth and nuance, from which it then draws certain conclusions about shape. We are not conscious of this. But it requires an examination of the separate parts before we can register something as simple as the fact that what we see is a ball and not a circle.
It is the brain which then produces the final form and, when it does, we no longer see all the detail we first registered. We cannot see the trees for the wood, so to speak. But what struck Mitchell and Snyder was that, if only we could reproduce the original image in our minds, we would be able to see the world in an entirely new way, and perhaps even recreate it, as Nadia had done without any training whatsoever.
Nadia saw the myriad details before they had been processed, which is why she began each time with an individual part, such as a hoof or a nose, because the totality as we perceive it did not yet exist in her mind. Balder found the idea appealing, even if he saw a number of problems with the theory, or at least had a number of questions.
In many ways this was the sort of original thinking he always looked for in his research: an approach which took nothing for granted but looked beyond the obvious, down to the small details. He grew more obsessed with the subject and read on with increasing fascination until, quite suddenly, he shuddered and even cried out loud, staring at his son with a stab of anxiety. It had nothing to do with the research findings, rather with the description of Nadia’s first year at school.
Nadia had been put in a school for autistic children, where the teaching was focused on getting her to talk for the first time. The girl made some progress — the words came, one by one. But there was a high price to pay. As she started to talk, her brilliance with crayons disappeared and, according to the author Lorna Selfe, it was likely that one language was being replaced by another. From having been an artistic genius, Nadia became a severely handicapped autistic girl who was able to speak a little but who had entirely lost the gift that had astounded the world. Was it worth it, just to be able to say a few words?
No, Balder wanted to shout out, possibly because he had always been prepared to do whatever it took to become a genius in his field. Anything but the ordinary! That had been his guiding principle all his life, and yet... he was clever enough to understand that his own elitist principles were not necessarily a good pointer to the right way forward now. Maybe a few fabulous drawings were nothing as compared to being able to ask for a glass of milk, or exchange a few words with a friend, or a father. What did he know?
Yet he refused to be faced with such a choice. He could not bear to give up the most wonderful thing that had happened in August’s life. No... that was simply not an option. No parent should have to decide. After all, no-one could anticipate what was best for the child.
The more he thought about it, the more unreasonable it seemed, and it occurred to him that he did not believe it, or perhaps that he simply did not want to believe it. Nadia’s was after all only one case.
He had to find out more. But just then his mobile rang. It had been ringing a lot over the last few hours. One call had been from a withheld number and another from Linus, his former assistant. He had less and less time for Linus; he was not even sure he trusted him — certainly he did not feel like talking to him now.
Yet he answered, maybe out of sheer nervousness. It was Gabriella Grane, the lovely analyst at the Security Police, and that put a little smile on his face. After Farah Sharif, Gabriella came a close second. She had sparklingly beautiful eyes and she was sharp-witted. He had a weakness for smart women.
“Gabriella,” he said, “I’d love to talk, but I don’t have the time. I’m right in the middle of something.”
“You’ve definitely got time for what I have to tell you,” she said with uncharacteristic severity. “You’re in danger.”
“Oh, nonsense, Gabriella! I told you, they may try to sue the shirt off my back — but that’s all.”
“Frans, I’m sorry, but some new information has come through, and from an extremely well-informed source at that. There does appear to be a genuine risk.”
“What do you mean?” he said, distracted. With the telephone clamped between his shoulder and ear, he was skimming another article on Nadia’s lost gift.
“I’m finding it hard to assess the information, I admit that, but it’s worrying me, Frans. It does have to be taken seriously.”
“In that case, yes. I do promise I’ll be extra careful. I’ll stay indoors as usual. But I’m a bit busy just now, as I was saying. Besides, I’m all but convinced that you’re wrong. At Solifon—”
“Sure, sure, I could be wrong,” she cut in. “That’s possible. But what if I’m right, what if there’s even a tiny, tiny risk that I am?”
“Well—”
“Frans, listen to me. I think you’re right. Nobody at Solifon wants to do you physical harm. It’s a civilized company, after all. But it seems as if someone or even more than one person in the company is in touch with a criminal organization operating out of Russia and Sweden. That’s where the threat is coming from.”
Balder took his eyes off the computer screen for the first time. He knew that Zigmund Eckerwald at Solifon was cooperating with a group of criminals. He had even picked up some codenames for the leader of that group, but he could not understand why they would go after him. Or could he?
“A criminal organization?” he muttered.
“Yes,” Grane said. “And isn’t it logical, in a way? That’s more or less what you’ve been saying, isn’t it? That once you’ve started stealing someone else’s ideas, and made money from them, then you’ve already crossed the line. It’s downhill from there on.”
“I think what I actually said was that all you needed was a gang of lawyers. With a gang of sharp lawyers you can safely steal whatever you like. Lawyers are the hit men of our times.”
“O.K., maybe so. But listen to me: I haven’t yet got approval for your personal protection, so I want to move you to a secret location. I’m coming to collect you.”
“What are you saying?”
“I think we have to act immediately.”
“Not a chance. I and...”
He hesitated.
“Do you have someone else there?”
“No, no, but I can’t go anywhere right now.”
“Aren’t you listening to what I’m saying?”
“I hear you loud and clear. But with all due respect it sounds to me as if it’s mostly speculation.”
“Speculation is an essential tool in assessing risk, Frans. And the person who got in touch with me... I suppose I shouldn’t really be saying this... is an agent from the N.S.A. who has this particular organization under surveillance.”
“The N.S.A.!” he snorted.
“I know you’re sceptical of them.”
“Sceptical doesn’t even begin to describe it.”
“O.K., O.K. But this time they’re on your side, at least this agent is. She’s a good person. By eavesdropping she’s picked up something which could very well be a plan to eliminate you.”
“Me?”
“There’s a lot to suggest that.”
“‘Could very well’ and ‘suggest’... it all sounds very vague.”
August reached for his pencils, and Balder concentrated on that for a moment.
“I’m staying where I am,” he said.
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“No, I’m not. I’d be happy to move if you get more information, but not right now. Besides, the alarm Milton installed is excellent. I’ve got cameras and sensors everywhere. And you do know that I’m a stubborn bastard, don’t you.”
“Do you have a weapon of any kind?”
“What’s got into you, Gabriella? A weapon! The most dangerous thing I own is my new cheese slicer.”
“You know...” she said, letting the words hang.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to arrange protection for you, whether you want it or not. I doubt you’ll even notice it. But since you’re going to be so damned obstinate, I have another piece of advice for you.”
“Tell me.”
“Go public. Tell the media what you know — then, if you’re lucky, there’ll be no point in someone getting rid of you.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Balder had detected a note of distraction in Grane’s voice.
“O.K.?” he said.
“Wait a moment,” she said. “I’ve got someone else on the line. I have to...”
She was gone, and Balder, who should have had much else to mull over, found himself thinking of only one thing: will August lose his ability to draw if I teach him to talk?
“Are you still there?” Grane asked after a short while.
“Of course.”
“I’m afraid I have to go. But I promise to see to it that you get some sort of protection as rapidly as possible. I’ll be in touch. Take care!”
He hung up with a sigh and thought again of Hanna, and of August and the checked floor reflected in the wardrobe doors, and of all kinds of things which seemed irrelevant just then. Almost absent-mindedly he said to himself, “They’re after me.”
He could see that it was not unreasonable, even though he had always refused to believe that it would actually come to violence. But what, in fact, did he know? Nothing. Besides, he could not be bothered to address it now. He continued his search for information on Nadia, and what implications this might have for his son, but that was insane. He was burying his head in the sand. Despite Grane’s warning he kept surfing and soon came upon the name of a professor of neurology, an expert on savant syndrome called Charles Edelman. Instead of reading on as he normally would — Balder always preferred the written to the spoken word — he called the switchboard at the Karolinska Institute.
Then it struck him how late it was. This Edelman was unlikely to be at work still, and his home number was not on the website. But wait a moment... he was also the head of Ekliden, an institution for autistic children with special abilities. Balder tried calling there. The telephone rang a number of times before a woman answered and introduced herself as Nurse Lindros.
“I’m sorry to disturb you so late in the evening,” Balder said. “I’m looking for Professor Edelman. Might he possibly still be there?”
“Yes, in fact, he is. No-one is setting off for home in this dreadful weather. Who may I say is calling?”
“Frans Balder,” he said, and in case it might help he added: “Professor Frans Balder.”
“Just a moment,” Nurse Lindros said, “I’ll see if he’s available.”
Balder stared down at August, who was once again gripping his pencil hesitantly, and that worried him somehow, as if it were an ominous sign. “A criminal organization,” he muttered again.
“Charles Edelman,” a voice said. “Am I really talking to Professor Balder?”
“The very same. I have a little—”
“You can’t know what an honour this is,” Edelman said. “I’m just back from a conference at Stanford where we actually discussed your work on neural networks; in fact we were even asking ourselves if we neurologists don’t have a great deal to learn about the brain through the back door, as it were, through A.I. research. We were wondering—”
“I’m flattered,” Balder interrupted. “But right now I have a quick question for you.”
“Oh, really? Is it something to do with your research?”
“Not at all. I have an autistic son. He’s eight years old and hasn’t yet said a single word, but the other day we passed a traffic light on Hornsgatan and afterwards...”
“Yes?”
“He just sat down and drew it at lightning speed, completely perfectly. It was astonishing!”
“And you want me to come and take a look at what he’s done?”
“I’d like that. But that’s not why I called. The fact is that I’m worried. I’ve read that perhaps drawing is the way in which he interacts with the world around him, and that he might lose this ability if he learns to talk.”
“I can tell that you’ve been reading about Nadia.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because she’s always mentioned in this context. But... may I call you Frans?”
“Of course.”
“Excellent, Frans, and I’m so glad you called. I can tell you straight away that you have nothing to worry about. On the contrary — Nadia is the exception that proves the rule, no more than that. All research shows that speech development actually enhances savant abilities. It can happen, of course, that children lose those skills, but that is mostly due to other factors. They get bored, or there’s a significant event in their lives. You probably read that Nadia lost her mother.”
“I did.”
“Maybe that was the reason, even though neither I nor anyone else can know for sure. But there’s virtually no other documented case of a similar evolution, and I’m not just saying this off the top of my head, or because it happens to be my own hypothesis. There is broad consensus today to the effect that savants have everything to gain from developing their intellectual skills on all levels.”
“And you’re sure of that?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“He’s also good at numbers.”
“Really?” Edelman said thoughtfully.
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it is extremely rare in a savant for artistic ability to be combined with mathematical talent. These two different skills have nothing in common, and sometimes they seem even to block each other.”
“But that’s how it is with my son. There’s a kind of geometric precision about his drawings, as if he had worked out the exact proportions.”
“How fascinating. When can I see him?”
“I don’t really know. For the time being I only wanted some advice.”
“In that case my advice is clear: make an effort with the boy. Stimulate him. Let him develop his skills in every way.”
“I...” Balder felt a strange pressure in his chest and found it hard to get the words out. “I want to thank you,” he said. “Really thank you. Now I have to...”
“It’s been such an honour to talk to you; it would be wonderful to be able to meet you and your son. I’ve developed quite a sophisticated test for savants, if I may boast a little. I could help you get to know the boy better.”
“Yes, of course, that would be terrific. But now I must...” Balder mumbled, without knowing what he wanted to say. “Goodbye, and thank you.”
“Oh, my pleasure, really. I hope to hear from you again soon.”
Balder hung up and sat still for a moment, his hands crossed over his chest, and looked at his son. August was still gazing at the burning candle, the yellow pencil in his hand. A shudder went across Balder’s shoulders, and the tears came. Whatever else you might say about Professor Balder, he was not one to cry easily.
In fact he could not remember when it had last happened. Not when his mother died, and definitely not when watching or reading anything. He thought of himself as a block of stone. But now, in front of his son with his rows of pencils and crayons, the professor cried like a child and he just let it happen, and of course it had been Charles Edelman’s words.
August would be able to learn to speak and could keep drawing, and that was overwhelming news. But Balder was not crying just because of that of course. There was also the drama at Solifon. The death threat. The secrets he was privy to and the longing for Hanna or Farah or anyone who could fill the gap in his heart.
“My little boy!” he said, so emotional he failed to notice his laptop switch itself on and show pictures from one of the surveillance cameras outside the house.
Out in the garden, in the blustering storm, there was a tall, thin man in a padded leather jacket, with a grey cap pulled down to conceal his face. Whoever it was knew that he was being filmed, and even if he seemed lean and agile there was something in his swaying walk which was reminiscent of a heavyweight boxer on his way into the ring.
Grane was sitting in her office at Säpo searching the web and the agency’s records. She did not really know what she was looking for. But something unfamiliar and worrying was gnawing away at her, something vague.
Her conversation with Balder had been interrupted by Helena Kraft, chief of Säpo, who was looking for her again to discuss the same matter as before. Alona Casales at the N.S.A. wanted to continue their conversation; this time she sounded calmer, and again a little flirtatious.
“Have you managed to sort out your computers?” Grane said.
“Ha... yes, that was a circus, but I don’t think it’s anything serious. I’m sorry if I was a little cryptic last time. I don’t have much of a choice. I just want to stress again that the level of threat against Professor Balder is both real and serious, even though we know nothing for certain. Did you have time to deal with it?”
“I’ve spoken to him. He refuses to leave his house, told me he was in the middle of something. I’m going to arrange protection.”
“Fine. As you might have guessed I’ve done more than just quickly check you out. I’m very impressed, Miss Grane. Shouldn’t someone like you be working for Goldman Sachs and earning millions?”
“Not my style.”
“Mine neither. I wouldn’t say no to the money, but this underpaid snooping is more my thing. Now, honey, here’s the situation. As far as my colleagues are concerned this isn’t a big deal — which I happen to disagree with. And not just because I’m convinced that this group represents a threat to our national economic interests. I also think there are political implications. One of those Russian computer engineers I mentioned, a guy called Anatoli Chabarov, is also linked to Ivan Gribanov, a member of the Russian Duma. He’s notorious, and a major shareholder in Gazprom.”
“I understand.”
“But most of it so far is just dead ends. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to crack the identity of the person at the top.”
“The man they call Thanos.”
“Or woman.”
“Woman?”
“I could be wrong. I know this type of group tends to exploit women, not promote them to leadership positions, and this figure has mostly been referred to as a he...”
“Then what makes you think it might be a woman?”
“A sort of reverence, you could say. They talk about ‘Thanos’ in the same way men through the ages have spoken about women they desire and revere.”
“A beauty, in other words.”
“Right. But maybe I’m just picking up some homoeroticism. Nothing would make me happier than if Russian gangsters and bigwigs in general were to indulge more in that department.”
“Ha, true!”
“In fact I mention it only so that you’ll keep an open mind if this mess ends up on your desk. You understand there are also quite a few lawyers mixed up in it. What else is new, right? Hackers steal and lawyers legitimize the theft.”
“‘True. Balder’s said to me that we’re all equal before the law — if we pay the same amount.’”
“Yes, if you can afford a strong defence you can get away with whatever you want these days. You do know who Balder’s legal opponents are, don’t you? The Washington firm Dackstone & Partner.”
“Sure.”
“In that case you know that the firm is also used by large tech companies to sue the shit out of inventors and innovators hoping to get some modest reward for their creations.”
“I discovered that when we were dealing with the lawsuits of that inventor Håkan Lans.”
“Grim, wasn’t it? But the interesting thing is that Dackstone crops up in one of the few conversations we’ve managed to track down and decrypt from this criminal network, although there the firm is simply referred to as D.P., or even D.”
“So Solifon and these crooks have the same lawyers?”
“It looks like it, and that’s not all. Dackstone is about to open an office in Stockholm — do you know how we found that out?”
“No,” Grane said. She was beginning to feel stressed. She wanted to finish the conversation and ensure that Balder got his police protection.
“Through our surveillance of this group,” Casales went on. “We know Chabarov mentions it once in passing, which suggests that there are ties to the firm. The group knew about the office opening even before it became public, and Dackstone & Partner is setting up in Stockholm together with a Swedish lawyer called Brodin. He used to be a criminal lawyer, and if you remember he was known for getting a little too cosy with his clients.”
“I do remember that classic picture in the evening papers — Kenny Brodin out on the town with some gangsters, with his hands all over a call girl,” Grane said.
“I saw that. I’d bet that Mr Brodin is a good place to start if you want to check out this story. Who knows? Maybe he’s the link between big business and this group.”
“I’ll take a look at it,” Grane said. “But right now I’ve got a number of other things to deal with. I’m sure we’ll be in touch again soon.”
She called the duty officer for Säpo’s Personal Protection Unit, who that evening was none other than Stig Yttergren. Her heart sank. Yttergren was sixty, overweight, known to be a heavy drinker, and most of all he liked to play cards online. He was sometimes called “Officer No-Can-Do”. She proceeded to explain the situation in her most authoritative tone and demanded that Professor Frans Balder in Saltsjö-baden be given a bodyguard as rapidly as possible. As usual Yttergren responded by saying that it would be extremely difficult, perhaps not possible at all. When she countered by saying that this was an order from the chief of Säpo herself, he muttered something which might even have been “that stroppy cunt”.
“I didn’t hear that,” Grane said. “Just make sure this is put in place immediately.” Which of course it was not. While she was waiting and drumming her fingers on her desk, she searched for information on Dackstone & Partner and anything else she could find linked to what Casales had been telling her — and that is when she was overcome by a sense of something horribly familiar.
But she could not put her finger on it. Before she could find what she was looking for Yttergren called back to say that no-one from Personal Protection was available. There was an unusual amount of activity for the royal family that evening, he said, some sort of public engagement with the Norwegian crown prince and princess, and the leader of the Swedish Democrats had had an ice cream thrown at his head before his guards could intervene, which meant that they had had to provide reinforcements for his late speech in Södertälje.
So Yttergren had sent out “two great guys from the regular police”, Peter Blom and Dan Flinck, and Grane had to make do with that, even if their names reminded her of Kling and Klang in Pippi Longstocking. For a moment she had serious misgivings. Then she got angry with herself.
It was so typical of her snobbish background to judge people by their names. She might have had more cause for concern if they had a posh name like Gyllentofs or something. Then they could have been irresponsible layabouts. I’m sure this’ll be fine, she thought.
Then she got back to work. It was going to be a long night.
Chapter 9
Salander woke up lying straight across the kingsize double bed and realized that she had been dreaming about her father. A feeling of menace swept over her like a cloak. But then she remembered the evening before and concluded that it could as easily be a chemical reaction in her body. She had a terrible hangover. She got up on wobbly legs and went into the large bathroom — with the jacuzzi and the marble and all the idiotic luxuries — to be sick. But nothing happened and she just sank to the floor, breathing heavily.
Then she stood up and looked at herself in the mirror, which was not especially reassuring either. Her eyes were red. On the other hand it was not long after midnight. She must have slept for a few hours only. She took a glass from the bathroom cupboard and filled it with water. But at the same moment the details of her dream came flooding back and she crushed the glass in her hand. Blood dripped to the floor, and she swore and realized that she was unlikely to be going back to sleep.
Should she try to crack the encrypted N.S.A. file she had downloaded? No, that would be pointless, at least for now. Instead she wound a towel around her hand and took from her bookshelves a new study by Princeton physicist Julie Tammet, which described how a big star collapses into a black hole. She lay down on the sofa by the windows overlooking Slussen and Riddarfjärden.
As she began to read she felt a little better. Blood from the towel did seep onto the pages and her head would not stop hurting, but she became more and more engrossed in the book, every now and then making a note in the margin. None of it was new to her. She knew better than most that a star stays alive as a result of two opposing actions, the fusion reactions at its core forcing it outwards and the gravitational pull keeping it together. She saw it as a balancing act, a tug of war from which a victor eventually emerges, once the fuel for the reactions runs out and the explosions weaken.
Once gravity gains the upper hand, the celestial body shrinks like a punctured balloon and becomes smaller and smaller. In this way, a star can vanish into nothing. Salander liked black holes. She felt an affinity with them.
Yet, like Julie Tammet, she was not interested in black holes per se, but rather in the process which creates them. Salander was convinced that if only she could describe that process she would be able to draw together the two irreconcilable languages of the universe, quantum physics and the theory of relativity. But it was no doubt beyond her capabilities, just like the bloody encryption, and involuntarily she began again to think about her father.
When she was a child, that revolting specimen had raped her mother over and over again, right up until the time her mother received injuries from which she would never recover. Salander herself, then twelve, hit back with a horrific force. At the time she could have no idea that her father was an important spy who had defected from the G.R.U., the Soviet military intelligence service, nor could she know that a special department within the Swedish Security Police, referred to as the Section, was protecting him at any cost. Yet even then she understood that there was some mystery surrounding the man, a darkness no-one was allowed to approach in any way. That even applied to so simple a thing as his name.
Zala, or Alexander Zalachenko to be more precise. Other fathers could be reported to the social services and the police. But Zala had forces behind him which were above all that.
It was this and one other thing which for her were true black holes.
The alarm went off at 1.18 and Balder woke with a start. Was there someone in the house? He felt an inexplicable fear and reached across the bed. August was lying beside him. The boy must have crept in as usual, and now he whimpered with worry, as if the wailing of the siren had made its way into his dreams. My little boy, Balder thought. Then he stiffened. Were those footsteps?
No, he must be imagining things. All you could hear was the alarm. He cast a worried look towards the storm beyond the windows. It seemed to have grown worse. The sea was beating against the jetty and the shore. The windowpanes shook and bowed. Could the alarm have been set off by a gust of wind? Perhaps it was as simple as that.
He still had to check to see if that protection Gabriella Grane was organizing had arrived at last. Two men from the regular police were supposed to have been there hours ago. It was a farce. They had been delayed by the storm and by a series of conflicting orders. It was either one thing or another, and he agreed with Grane, it seemed hopelessly incompetent.
He would have to deal with that in due course. Now he had to make a call. But August was beginning to wake up, and a hysterical child banging his body against the headboard was the last thing Balder needed right now. The earplugs, it occurred to him, those old green earplugs he had bought at Frankfurt airport.
He took them from the bedside table and gently pushed them into his son’s ears. Then he tucked him in and kissed him on the cheek and stroked his curly, tousled hair, straightened the collar on the boy’s pyjamas and made sure that his head was resting comfortably on the pillow. Balder was frightened and should have been in a hurry, or had every reason to be. Yet he took his time and fussed over his son. Perhaps it was a sentimental moment in the midst of a crisis. Or he wanted to put off confronting whatever awaited him out there. For a moment he wished he did have a weapon. Not that he would have known how to use it.
He was a programmer, for heaven’s sake, who had developed some paternal instinct in his old age, that was all. He should never have got into this mess. To hell with Solifon and the N.S.A. and all criminal gangs! But now he had to get a grip. With stealthy, uncertain steps he went into the hallway, and before doing anything else, before even looking out at the road, he turned off the alarm. The racket had set his nerves on edge and in the sudden silence which followed he stood stock still. Then his mobile rang and even though it startled him he was grateful for the distraction.
“Yes,” he said.
“Hello, this is Jonas Anderberg, I’m on duty tonight at Milton Security. Is everything alright?”
“What, well... I think so. My alarm went off.”
“I know that and, according to our instructions, when this happens you’re supposed to go down to a special room in the cellar and lock the door. Are you down there?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“Good, very good. Do you know what’s happened?”
“No idea. The alarm woke me up. I have no clue what set it off. Could it have been the storm?”
“Unlikely... One moment please!”
Anderberg’s voice sounded a bit unfocused.
“What is it?” Balder said nervously.
“It seems...”
“For God’s sake, tell me what’s going on.”
“Sorry, just take it easy, take it easy... I’m going through the picture sequence from your cameras, and it does look as if...”
“As if what?”
“As if you’ve got a visitor. A man, well, you can see for yourself later, a lanky man with dark glasses and a cap has been prowling around your property. He’s been there twice, as far as I can see, but as I said... I’ve only just noticed it now. I’d have to look at it more closely to be able to say more.”
“What sort of person is it?”
“Well, it’s hard to say.”
Anderberg seemed to be studying the picture sequences again.
“But maybe... I don’t know... no, it’s too soon to be speculating,” he said.
“Go on, please go on. I need something specific. It would make me feel better.”
“O.K., in that case there’s at least one reassuring thing I can tell you.”
“And what’s that?”
“His walk. The man walks like a junkie — like a guy who’s just taken a load of speed. There’s something cocky and stilted about the way he moves, and of course that could be a sign that he’s just an ordinary druggie and petty thief. On the other hand...”
“Yes?”
“He’s done a very good job of hiding his face and then...”
Anderberg fell silent again.
“Keep going!”
“One moment.”
“You’re making me nervous, you know that?”
“Don’t mean to. But you know...”
Balder froze. The sound of a car engine could be heard from his garage drive.
“... you’re getting a visitor.”
“What should I do?”
“Stay where you are.”
“O.K.,” Balder said, more or less paralysed. But he was not where Anderberg thought he was.
When the telephone rang at 1.58, Blomkvist was still awake. But his mobile was in the pocket of his jeans on the floor and he did not manage to answer it in time. In any case the call was from a withheld number, so he swore and crawled back into bed and closed his eyes.
He could really do without another sleepless night. Ever since Berger had fallen asleep a little before midnight, he had been tossing and turning and thinking about his life. Not much of it felt right, not even his relationship to Berger. He had loved her for many years, and there was every reason to think that she felt the same way about him. But it was no longer as simple as once it had been. Perhaps Blomkvist had started to feel some sympathy for Greger. Greger Beckman was Erika’s husband, an artist, and he could not reasonably be accused of being grudging or small-minded. On the contrary, when Greger had realized that Erika would never get over Blomkvist or even be able to stop herself from tearing his clothes off every now and then, he had not lost his temper. He had made a deal:
“You can be with him — just so long as you always come back to me.” And that’s how it became.
They set up an unconventional arrangement, with Berger mostly sleeping at home with her husband in Saltsjöbaden, but sometimes here with Blomkvist at Bellmansgatan. Over the years Blomkvist had thought that it really was an ideal solution, one which many couples who lived under the dictatorship of monogamy ought to have adopted. Every time Berger said, “I love my husband more when I can also be with you,” or when at some cocktail party Beckman put his arm around him in a brotherly embrace, Blomkvist had thanked his lucky stars for the arrangement.
Yet he had lately begun to have doubts, perhaps because he had had more time to think and it had occurred to him that something that is called an agreement is not necessarily always that.
On the contrary, one party might advance their self-interest under the guise of a common decision, and in the long run it often becomes clear that someone is suffering, despite assurances to the contrary. Berger’s call to her husband that evening had evidently not been well received. Who knows? Maybe Beckman was also lying awake right now.
Blomkvist tried to put it out of his mind. For a little while he even tried daydreaming. But that did not help much, and in the end he got up, determined to do something more useful. Why not do some reading on industrial espionage or, better still, sketch out an alternative funding plan for Millennium? He got dressed, sat down at his computer and checked his inbox.
Most of it was rubbish as usual, even if some of the emails did give him a bit of a boost. There were shouts of encouragement from Malm and Eriksson, also from Andrei Zander and Harriet Vanger in the light of the coming battle with Serner, and he answered them with more of a fighting spirit than he actually felt. After that he checked Salander’s document, without expecting to find anything there. But then he lit up. She had answered. For the first time in ages she had given a sign of life:
And what happens, Blomkvist, if we create a machine which is a little bit cleverer than we are?>
Blomkvist smiled and thought of the last time they had met, at Kaffebar on St Paulsgatan. It took a while before he noticed that her message contained two questions, the first one a friendly little jibe which perhaps regrettably contained a grain of truth. What he had written in the magazine lately had lacked intelligence and genuine newsworthiness. Like so many journalists, he had just been plugging away, occasionally trotting out clichés. But that’s how it was for the moment and he was much keener to ponder Salander’s second question, her riddle, not so much because in itself it interested him especially, but because he wanted to think of some clever response.
If we create a machine that is cleverer than we ourselves are, he thought, what happens then? He went to the kitchen, opened a bottle of Ramlösa mineral water and sat at the kitchen table. Downstairs Fru Gerner was coughing rather painfully and in the distance, amid the hubbub of the city, an ambulance wailed away in the storm. Well, he mused, then we get a machine that can do all the clever things which we ourselves can do, plus a little bit more, for example... He laughed out loud and understood the point of the question. A machine like that could go on to produce something more intelligent than itself in turn, and then what happens?
The same would be true of the next machine and the next one and the next one, and soon the very source of it all, man himself, would be no more interesting to the latest computer than a lab rat. There would be an explosion of intelligence beyond all control, as in the Matrix films. Blomkvist smiled and went back to his computer and wrote:
After that he sat looking out through the window, in so far as one could see anything beyond the swirling snow. Every now and then he looked through the open door at Berger, who was sleeping soundly and who knew nothing about machines more intelligent than human beings, or was not the least bit concerned about that right now.
He thought he heard his mobile give a ping, and sure enough he had a new voicemail. That worried him, he was not really sure why. Apart from ex-girlfriends who call when they’re drunk and want to have sex, you generally only get bad news at night. The voice on the message sounded harried:
My name is Frans Balder. I know it’s rude to call this late. I apologize for that. But my situation has become somewhat critical, at least that’s how I see it. I’ve just discovered that you were looking for me, which is really a strange coincidence. There are a few things I’ve been wanting to tell you about for some time now, I think they might interest you. I’d be grateful if you could get in touch as soon as possible. I have a feeling that this might be a bit urgent.
Balder left a telephone number and an email address and Blomkvist jotted them down and sat still for a while, drumming his fingers on the kitchen table. Then he dialled the number.
Balder was lying in bed, agitated and scared. Yet he was feeling a little calmer now. The car coming up his drive had been the police guard arriving at long last. Two men in their forties, one tall and one quite short, both looking cocky and with the same short, trendy haircut. But they were perfectly polite and apologized for the delay in taking up their post.
“Milton Security and Gabriella Grane at the Security Police briefed us on the situation,” one said.
They were aware that a man wearing a cap and dark glasses had been snooping around the property and that they had to be on their guard. Therefore they turned down the offer of a cup of hot tea in the kitchen. They wanted to check out the house and Balder thought that sounded perfectly professional and sensible. In other respects they did not make a very positive impression, but then he did not get an overwhelmingly negative impression either. He had put their numbers into his mobile and gone back to bed to be with August, who was sleeping, curled up, his green earplugs still in place.
But of course Balder had not been able to fall asleep again. He was listening for noises out there in the storm and eventually he sat up in bed. He had to do something, or he would go mad. He checked his mobile. He had two messages from Linus Brandell, who sounded bad-tempered and defensive all at the same time. At first Balder felt like hanging up. But then he caught a couple of things which were interesting after all. Linus had spoken to Mikael Blomkvist at Millennium magazine and now Blomkvist wanted to get in touch, and at that Balder began to think. Mikael Blomkvist, he muttered.
Is he to be my link with the outside world?
Balder knew very little about Swedish journalists. But he did know who Blomkvist was, and was aware of his reputation as someone who always went right to the heart of his stories, never yielding to pressure. That in itself did not necessarily make him the right man for the job — plus, somehow Balder seemed to recall hearing other less flattering things — so he called Gabriella Grane again. She knew just about everything there was to know about the media scene and had said that she would be staying up late.
“Hello,” she answered right away. “I was about to get in touch. I’m just looking at that man on the C.C.T.V. We really ought to move you now, you know.”
“But my God, Gabriella, the police are here — finally. They’re sitting right outside the front door.”
“There’s no reason to suppose that the man will come through the front door.”
“Why would he come at all? The man at Milton said he looked like an old junkie.”
“I’m not so sure about that. He’s carrying some sort of box, something technical. We should play this safe.”
Balder glanced at August lying next to him.
“I’m quite happy to move tomorrow. That might help my nerves. But I’m not going anywhere tonight — your policemen seem professional, professional enough at any rate.”
“If you’re going to be stubborn about this I’ll see to it that Flinck and Blom make themselves conspicuous and cover the entire property.”
“Fine, but that’s not why I’m calling. You said I ought to go public, remember?”
“Well... yes... That’s not the kind of advice you would expect from the Security Police, is it? I still think it would be a good idea, but first I’d like you to tell us what you know. I’m feeling a little apprehensive about this story.”
“In that case let’s talk tomorrow morning, when we’ve had a good sleep. But one thing, what do you think of Mikael Blomkvist at Millennium? Could he be the right sort of person to talk to?”
Grane gave a laugh. “If you want my colleagues to have an apoplectic fit, then definitely talk to him.”
“Is it as bad as that?”
“At Säpo people avoid him like the plague. If you find Blomkvist on your doorstep, then you know your whole year is shot, they say. Everybody here, including Helena Kraft, would advise against it in the strongest terms.”
“But it’s you I’m asking.”
“Well, my answer is that your reasoning is sound. He’s a damn fine journalist.”
“Hasn’t he also come in for some criticism?”
“For sure, people have been saying that he’s past his prime and that his writing isn’t positive or upbeat enough, or whatever. But he’s an old-fashioned investigative reporter of the highest calibre. Do you have his contact details?”
“My ex-assistant gave them to me.”
“Good, great. But before you get in touch with him, you must first tell us what you have. Do you promise?”
“I promise, Gabriella. Now I’m going to sleep for a few hours.”
“Do that, and I’ll keep in touch with Flinck and Blom and arrange a safe house for you first thing in the morning.”
After he had hung up he tried again to get some rest. But it proved as impossible this time as before. The storm made him increasingly restless and worried. It felt as if something evil was travelling across the sea towards him, and he could not help listening anxiously for any unusual sounds.
It was true that he had promised Grane he would talk to her first. But he could not wait — everything he had kept bottled up for so long was throbbing to get out. He knew it was irrational; nothing could be that urgent. It was the middle of the night and, regardless of what Grane had said, he was by any reckoning safer than he had been for a long time. He had police protection and a first-rate security system. But that did not help. He was agitated, and so he got out the number Linus had given him and dialled it. But of course Blomkvist did not answer.
Why would he? It was far too late, and Balder left a voice message instead in a slightly forced, whispered voice so as not to wake August. Then he got up and put on his bedside light. On the bookshelf by the bed there was some literature which had nothing to do with his work, and both absent-minded and worried he flicked through an old novel by Stephen King, Pet Sematary. But that made him think even more about evil figures travelling through the night. For a long time he just stood there with the book in his hand — then he felt a stab of apprehension, which he might have dismissed as nonsense in broad daylight but which now seemed totally plausible. He had a sudden urge to speak to Farah or better still Steven Warburton in Los Angeles, who would be certain to be awake, and while imagining all sorts of unpleasant scenarios, he looked out to sea and the night and the restless clouds scudding across the sky. At that moment his mobile rang, as if it had heard his prayer. But it was neither Farah nor Warburton.
“My name is Mikael Blomkvist,” the voice said. “You’ve been looking for me.”
“That’s right. I’m sorry to have called so late.”
“No problem. I was awake anyway.”
“Can you talk now?”
“Absolutely, I was in fact just answering a message from a person whom I think we both know. Lisbeth Salander.”
“Who?”
“Sorry, maybe I’ve got hold of the wrong end of the stick. I thought you had hired her to go through your computers and trace a suspected data breach.”
Balder laughed. “Yes, my God, she’s a strange girl, that one,” he said. “But she never told me her surname, even though we had a lot of contact for a while. I assumed she had her reasons, and I never pushed her. I met her at one of my lectures at the Royal Institute of Technology. I’d be happy to tell you about it; it was pretty astonishing. But what I meant to ask was... well, you’ll probably think it’s a crazy idea.”
“Sometimes I like crazy ideas.”
“You wouldn’t feel like coming over right now? It would mean a lot to me. I’m sitting on a story which I think is pretty explosive. I can pay for your taxi here and back.”
“Thanks, but I always pick up my own tab. Tell me, why do we have to talk now, in the middle of the night?”
“Because...” Balder hesitated. “Because I have a feeling this is urgent, or actually it’s more than a feeling. I’ve just been told that I’m under threat, and an hour or so ago someone was snooping around my property. I’m frightened, to be completely honest, and I want to get this information off my chest. I no longer want to be the only one in the know.”
“O.K.”
“O.K. what?”
“I’ll come — if I can manage to get hold of a taxi.”
Balder gave him the address and hung up, then called Professor Warburton in Los Angeles, and had an intense conversation with him on an encrypted line for about thirty minutes. Then he put on a pair of jeans and a black cashmere polo neck and went in search of a bottle of Amarone, in case that was the kind of thing Blomkvist might enjoy. But he got no further than the doorway before he started in fright.
He thought he had seen a movement, something flashing past, and looked anxiously towards the jetty and the sea. But it was the same desolate, storm-lashed scene as before, and he dismissed whatever it was as a figment of his imagination, a product of his nervous frame of mind, or at least he tried to. He left the bedroom and walked past the large window on his way towards the upper floor. Suddenly gripped by a new fear, he spun around again and this time he really did glimpse something over by the house next door.
A figure was racing along in the shelter of the trees, and even if Balder did not see the person for more than a matter of seconds, he could make out that it was a powerfully built man with a rucksack and dark clothes. The man ran in a crouch and something about the way he moved had a trained look to it, as if he had run like that many times before, perhaps in a distant war. It took a few moments for Balder to fumble for his mobile, and he tried to work out which of the numbers on his call list belonged to the policemen out there.
He had not put their names into his contacts, and now was uncertain. With a shaking hand he tried one which he thought was right. No-one answered, not at first. The ring tone sounded three, four, five times before a voice panted out, “Blom here, what’s up?”
“I saw a man running along the line of trees by my neighbour’s house. I don’t know where he is now. But he could very well be up by the road near you.”
“O.K., we’ll check it out.”
“He seemed...” Balder said.
“What?”
“I don’t know, quick.”
Dan Flinck and Peter Blom were sitting in the police car chatting about their young colleague, Anna Berzelius, and the size of her bum.
Both had recently got divorced. Their divorces had been pretty painful at first. They both had young children, wives who felt let down and parents-in-law who to varying degrees called them irresponsible shits. But once the dust had settled and they had got shared custody of the children and new if modest homes, they had both been struck by the same realization: that they missed their bachelor days. Lately, during the weeks when they were not looking after the kids, they had lived it up as never before. Afterwards, just like when they were in their teens, they had discussed all the parties in detail, especially the women they had met, reviewing their physiques from top to bottom, and their prowess in bed. But on this occasion they had not had time to discuss Anna Berzelius in as much depth as they would have liked.
Blom’s mobile rang and they both jumped, partly because he had changed his ringtone to an extreme version of “Satisfaction”, but mainly of course because the night and the storm and the emptiness out here had made them edgy. Besides, Blom had his telephone in his pocket, and since his trousers were tight — his waistline had expanded as a result of all the partying — it took a while before he could get it out. When he hung up he looked worried.
“What’s that about?” Flinck said.
“Balder saw a man, a quick bastard, apparently.”
“Where?”
“Down by the trees next to the neighbour’s house. The guy’s probably on his way up towards us.”
Blom and Flinck stepped out of the car. They had been outside many times over the course of this long night, but this was the first time they shivered right down to the bone. For an instant they just stood looking awkwardly to the right and the left, shocked by the cold. Then Blom — the taller of the two — took command and told Flinck to stay up by the road while he himself went down towards the water.
It was a short slope which extended along a wooden fence and a small avenue of newly planted trees. A lot of snow had fallen, it was slippery and at the bottom lay the sea. Baggensfjärden, Blom thought, and in fact he was surprised that the water had not frozen over, but that may have been because of the waves. Blom cursed at the storm and at this night duty which wore him out and ruined his beauty sleep. He tried to do his job all the same, not with his whole heart perhaps, but still.
He listened out for sounds and looked about him, and at first he could not pick out anything from the surroundings. It was dark. Only the light from a single lamp post shone into the property, immediately in front of the jetty, and he went down, past a garden chair which had been flung about in the storm, and in the next moment he could see Balder through the large windowpane.
Balder was standing some way inside the house, bent over a large bed, his body in a tensed position. Perhaps he was straightening the covers, it was hard to tell. He seemed busy with some small detail in the bed. Blom should not be bothering about it — he was meant to be keeping watch over the property — yet there was something in Balder’s body language which fascinated him and for a second or two he lost his concentration before he was brought back to reality again.
He had a chilling feeling that someone was watching him, and he spun around, his eyes searching wildly. He saw nothing, not at first, and had just begun to calm down when he became aware of two things — a sudden movement by the shiny steel bins next to the fence, and the sound of a car up by the road. The engine stopped and a car door was opened.
Neither occurrence was noteworthy in itself. There could be an animal by the rubbish bins and cars could come or go here even late at night. Yet Blom’s body stiffened completely and for a moment he just stood there, not knowing how to react. Then Flinck’s voice could be heard.
“Someone’s coming!”
Blom did not move. He felt that he was being watched and almost unconsciously he fingered the service weapon at his hip and thought of his mother and his ex-wife and his children, as if something serious really was about to happen. Flinck was shouting again, now with a desperate tone in his voice, “Police! You! Stop right there!” and then Blom ran up towards the road, although it did not seem the obvious option even then. He could not rid himself of the apprehension that he was leaving something threatening and unpleasant down there by the steel bins. But if his partner shouted like that, he did not have a choice, did he? And he felt secretly relieved. He had been more frightened than he cared to admit and so he hurried off and came stumbling up onto the road.
Up ahead, Flinck was chasing after an unsteady man with a broad back and clothes that were far too thin and, even though he hardly fitted the description of a “quick bastard”, Blom ran after him. Soon afterwards they brought him down by the side of the ditch, right next to a couple of letterboxes and a small lantern which cast a pale light over the whole scene.
“Who the hell are you?” Flinck bellowed with surprising aggression — he had been scared too — and the man looked at them in confusion and terror.
He was not wearing a hat, he had hoarfrost in his hair and in the stubble on his chin and you could tell that he was cold and in pretty bad shape. But above all there was something extraordinarily familiar about his face.
For a few seconds Blom thought that they had arrested a known and wanted criminal and he swelled with pride.
Balder had gone back to the bedroom and tucked August in again, perhaps to hide him under the blanket if anything should happen. Then he had a completely crazy thought, prompted by the sense of foreboding he had just felt, which was accentuated by his conversation with Warburton. Probably his mind was just clouded by panic and fear.
He realized it was not a new idea but something which had been developing in his subconscious during many sleepless nights in California. So he got out his laptop, his own little supercomputer connected to a series of other machines for sufficient capacity, and opened the A.I. program to which he had dedicated his life, and then...
He deleted the file and all of the back-up. He barely thought it through. He was like an evil God snuffing out a life, and perhaps that was exactly what he was doing. Nobody knew, not even he himself, and he sat there for a little while, wondering if he would be floored by remorse and regret. It was incomprehensible, wasn’t it? His life’s work was gone, with just a few taps of a key.
But oddly enough it made him calmer, as if at least one aspect of his life was now protected. He got to his feet and once more looked out into the night and the storm. Then the telephone rang. It was Flinck, the second policeman.
“I just wanted to say that we apprehended the man you saw,” the policeman said. “In other words, you can relax. We have the situation under control.”
“Who is it?” Balder said.
“I couldn’t say. He’s very drunk and we have to get him to quieten down. I just wanted to let you know. We’ll get back to you.”
Balder put the mobile down on the bedside table, next to his laptop, and tried to congratulate himself. Now the man was under arrest, and his research would not fall into the wrong hands. Yet he was not reassured. At first he did not understand why. Then it hit him: the man who had run along the trees had been anything but drunk.
It took a full minute or more before Blom realized that they had not in fact arrested a notorious criminal but rather the actor Lasse Westman, who did often enough play bandits and hit men on screen, but who was not himself wanted for any crime. The realization did not make Blom feel any calmer. Not just because he suspected it had been a mistake to leave the area of the trees and the bins down there, but because this whole episode could lead to scandal and headlines in the press.
He knew enough about Westman to be aware that whatever that man did all too often ended up in the evening papers, and you could not say that the actor was looking particularly happy. He puffed and swore as he scrambled to get to his feet and Blom tried to work out what on earth the man was doing out here in the middle of the night.
“Do you live in the area?” he said.
“I don’t have to tell you a fucking thing,” Westman hissed, and Blom turned to Flinck in an attempt to understand how the whole drama had begun.
But Flinck was already standing a little way off talking into his mobile, apparently with Balder. He probably wanted to show how efficient he was by passing on the news that they had seized the suspect, if indeed he was the suspect.
“Have you been snooping around Professor Balder’s property?” Blom said.
“Didn’t you hear what I said? I’m not telling you a fucking thing. What the hell, here I am strolling around perfectly peacefully and along comes that maniac waving his pistol. It’s scandalous. Don’t you know who I am?”
“I know who you are, and if we have overreacted then I apologize. I’m sure we’ll have a chance to talk about it again. But right now we’re in the middle of a tense situation and I demand that you tell me at once what brought you here to Professor Balder — oh no, don’t you try to run away now!”
Westman was probably not trying to escape at all. He was only having trouble keeping his balance. Then he cleared his throat rather dramatically and spat right out into the air. The phlegm did not get far but flew back like a projectile and froze to ice on his cheek.
“Do you know something?” he said, wiping his face.
“No?”
“I’m not the bad guy in this story.”
Blom looked nervously down towards the water and the avenue of trees and wondered yet again what he had seen there. And still he remained standing where he was, paralysed by the absurdity of the situation.
“Well then, who is?”
“Balder.”
“How so?”
“He’s taken my girlfriend’s son.”
“Why would he have done that?”
“You shouldn’t bloody well be asking me! Ask the computer genius in there! That bastard has absolutely no right to him,” Westman said, and fumbled in the inside pocket of his coat.
“He doesn’t have a child in the house, if that’s what you think,” Blom said.
“He sure as hell does.”
“Really?”
“Really!”
“So you thought you’d come along here in the middle of the night, pissed as a newt, and fetch the child,” Blom said, and he was about to make another crushing comment when he was interrupted by a sound, a soft clinking sound coming up from the water’s edge.
“What was that?” he said.
“What was what?” answered Flinck, who was standing next to him and did not seem to have heard anything at all. It was true that the sound had not been all that loud, at least not up here.
Yet it still made Blom shudder. He was just about to go down to investigate when he hesitated again. As he looked around anxiously he could hear another car approaching.
It was a taxi which drove past and stopped at Balder’s front door, and that gave Blom an excuse to stay up on the road. While the driver and the passenger settled up he cast yet another worried look down to the water and thought that he could hear something more, and this sound was no more reassuring.
He did not know for sure, and now the car door opened and a man climbed out whom Blom, after a moment’s confusion, recognized as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, though God only knew why the hell all these celebrities had to congregate out here in the middle of the night.
Chapter 10
Balder was standing in the bedroom next to his computer and his mobile, looking at August, who was whimpering uneasily in the bed. He wondered what the boy was dreaming. Was it about a world which he could even understand? Balder wanted to know. He felt that he wanted to start living, no longer bury himself in quantum algorithms and source codes and paranoia.
He wanted to be happy, not tormented by that constant weight in his body; he wanted instead to launch himself into something wild and magnificent, a romance even. For a few intense seconds he thought about the women who had fascinated him: Gabriella, Farah, others too.
He also thought about the woman who it turned out was called Salander. He had been spellbound by her, and as he now remembered her he saw something new in her, something both familiar and strange: she reminded him of August. That was absurd, of course. August was a small autistic boy, and while Salander was not that old either, and there may have been something boyish about her, otherwise she was his polar opposite. Dressed in black, a bit of a punk, totally uncompromising. Still it occurred to him now that her eyes had that same strange shine as August’s when he had been staring at the traffic light on Hornsgatan.
Balder had encountered Salander during a lecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in the course of a talk he was giving on technical singularity, the hypothetical state when computers become more intelligent than the human being. He had just begun by explaining the concept of singularity in terms of mathematics and physics when the door opened and a skinny girl in black strode into the lecture hall. His first thought was that it was a shame there was no other place for junkies to go. Then he wondered if the girl really was an addict. She did not seem strung out, but on the other hand she did look tired and surly, and did not appear to be paying any attention to his lecture. She just sat there slouched over a desk. Eventually, in the middle of a discussion of the moment of singularity in complex mathematical calculation, the point where the solution hits infinity, he asked her straight out what she thought of it all. That was mean. Why should he pick on her? But what had happened?
The girl looked up and said that, instead of bandying fuzzy concepts about, he should become sceptical when the basis for his calculations fell apart. It was not some sort of real-world physical collapse, more a sign that his own mathematics were not up to scratch, and therefore it was sheer populism on his part to mystify singularities in black holes when it was so obvious that the main problem was the absence of a quantum mechanical method for calculating gravity.
With icy clarity — which set off a buzz in the hall — she then presented a sweeping critique of the singularity theorists he had quoted, and he was incapable of coming up with any answer other than a dismayed: “Who the hell are you?”
That was their first contact. The girl was to surprise him a few times more after that. With lightning speed or just one bright glance she immediately grasped what he was working on and, when he realized that his technology had been stolen, he had asked for her help. That had created a bond between them — they shared a secret.
Now he was standing there in the bedroom thinking of her. But his thoughts were interrupted. He was overcome by a new chilling sense of unease and he looked through the doorway towards the large window overlooking the water.
In front of it stood a tall figure in dark clothes and a tight black cap with a small lamp on his forehead. He was doing something to the window. He pulled across it with a swift and powerful movement, like an artist starting work on a fresh canvas, and before Balder had time to cry out, the entire window fell in and the figure moved towards him.
Jan Holtser usually told people that he worked on industrial security issues. In actual fact he was a former Russian special forces soldier who spent his time breaking into security systems. He had a small skilled staff and, for operations like this one, the preparations were as a rule so painstaking that the risks were not as great as one might imagine.
It’s true that he was no longer a young man, but for fifty-one he kept himself in good shape with hard training and was known for his efficiency and ability to improvise. If fresh circumstances cropped up, he thought about them and took them into consideration in his planning.
His experience tended to make up for his lack of youthful vigour, and occasionally, in the limited circle within which he could talk openly, he would speak of a sort of sixth sense, an acquired instinct. He had learned over the years when to wait and when to strike, and although he had been through a bad patch a couple of years earlier and betrayed signs of weakness — humanity, his daughter would say — he now felt that he was more accomplished than ever before.
He was once more able to take pleasure in his work, that old sense of excitement. Yes, he did still dose himself with ten milligrams of Stesolid before an operation, but that was only because it enhanced his accuracy with weapons. He remained crystal clear and alert at critical moments, and most important: he always carried out the tasks he was assigned. Holtser was not someone who let people down or bailed out. That was how he thought of himself.
And yet tonight, even though his client had stressed that the job was urgent, he had considered calling it off. The bad weather was a factor. But the storm in itself would never have been enough to get him to consider cancelling. He was Russian and a soldier, and had fought in far worse conditions than these, and he hated people who moaned about trivial things.
What bothered him was the police guard, which had appeared out of nowhere. He did not think much of the policemen on the property. From his hiding place he had seen them snooping around with the vague reluctance of small boys told to go outside in bad weather. They would rather have stayed sitting in their car talking rubbish, and they were easily frightened, especially the taller of the two, who seemed to dislike the dark and the storm and the black water. As he stood there staring in among the trees a little while ago, he had looked to be terrified, presumably because he had sensed Holtser’s presence, but that was not something that worried Holtser. He could have slit the man’s throat swiftly and soundlessly.
Still, the fact of policemen was not good news.
Their presence considerably raised the level of risk; above all it was an indication that some part of the plan had leaked out, that there was a heightened readiness. Maybe the professor had started to talk, in which case the operation would be meaningless, it might even make their situation worse. Holtser was determined not to expose his client to any unnecessary risks. He regarded that as one of his strengths. He always saw the bigger picture and, despite his profession, he was often the one who counselled caution.
He had lost count of the number of criminal gangs in his home country which had gone under because they had resorted too often to violence. Violence can command respect. Violence can silence and intimidate, and ward off risks and threats. But violence can also cause chaos and a whole chain of unwanted consequences.
All those thoughts had gone through his mind as he sat hidden behind the trees and the line of bins. For a few seconds he was resolved to abort the operation and go back to his hotel room. Yet that did not happen.
A car arrived, occupying the policemen’s attention, and he spotted an opportunity, an opening. Without stopping to evaluate his motivations he fitted the elastic of the lamp over his head. He got out the diamond saw from his left-hand jacket pocket and drew his weapon, a 1911 R1 Carry with a custom-made silencer, and weighed them, one in each hand. Then, as ever, he said:
“Thy will be done, amen.”
Yet he could not shake off the uncertainty. Was this right? He would have to act with lightning speed. True, he knew the house inside out and Jurij had been here twice and hacked the alarm system. Plus the policemen were hopeless amateurs. Even if he were delayed in there — say the professor did not have his computer next to his bed, as everyone had said, and they had time to come to his aid — Holtser would be able to dispose of them too without any problem. He even looked forward to it. He therefore muttered a second time:
“Thy will be done, amen.”
Then he disengaged the safety on his weapon and moved rapidly to the large window overlooking the water. It may have been due to the uncertainty of the situation, but he felt an unusually strong reaction when he saw Balder standing there in the bedroom, engrossed in something, and he tried to persuade himself that everything was fine. The target was clearly visible. Yet he still felt apprehensive: Should he call the job off?
He did not. Instead he tensed the muscles in his right arm and with all his strength drew the diamond cutter across the window and pushed. The window collapsed with a disturbing crash and he rushed in and raised his weapon at Balder, who was staring hard at him, waving his hand as though in a desperate greeting. The professor began to say something confused and ceremonious which sounded like a prayer, a litany. But instead of “God” or “Jesus” Holtser heard the word “disabled”. That was all he managed to catch, and in any case it did not matter. People had said all sorts of things to him.
He showed no mercy.
Quickly and almost soundlessly the figure moved through the hallway into the bedroom. In that time Balder registered with surprise that the alarm had not gone off and noticed a motif of a grey spider on the man’s jersey, also a narrow, oblong scar on his pale forehead below the cap and the lamp.
Then he saw the weapon. The man was pointing a pistol at him. Balder raised his hand in a vain attempt to protect himself. But even though his life was on the line and fear had set its claws into him he thought only of August. Whatever else happened, even if he himself had to die, let his son be spared. He burst out:
“Don’t kill my child! He’s disabled, he doesn’t understand anything.”
Balder did not know how far he got. The whole world froze and the night and the storm seemed to bear down on him and then everything went black.
Holtser fired and as he had expected there was nothing wrong with his aim. He hit Balder twice in the head and the professor collapsed to the floor like a flapping scarecrow. There was no doubt that he was dead. Yet something did not feel right. A blustery wind swept in off the sea and brushed across Holtser’s neck as if it were a cold, living being, and for a second or two he had no idea what was happening.
Everything had gone according to plan and over there was Balder’s computer, just as he had been told. He should just take it and go. He needed to be efficient. Yet he stood there as if frozen to the spot and it was only after a strangely long delay that he realized why.
In the large double bed, almost completely hidden by a duvet, lay a small boy with unruly, tousled hair watching him with a glassy look. Those eyes made him uncomfortable, and that was not just because they seemed to be looking straight through him. There was more to it than that. But then again it made no difference.
He had to carry out his assignment. Nothing must be allowed to jeopardize the operation and expose them all to risk. Here was someone who was clearly a witness, especially now that he had exposed his face, and there must be no witnesses, so he pointed his weapon at the boy and looked into his glowing eyes and for the third time muttered:
“Thy will be done, amen.”
Blomkvist climbed out of the taxi in a pair of black boots and a white fur coat with a broad sheepskin collar, which he had dug out of the cupboard, as well as an old fur hat that had belonged to his father.
It was then 2.40 in the morning. The Ekot news bulletin had reported a serious accident involving an articulated lorry which was now blocking the main Värmdö road. But Blomkvist and the taxi driver had seen nothing of that and had travelled together through the dark, storm-battered suburbs. Blomkvist was sick with exhaustion. All he had wanted was to stay at home and creep into bed with Erika again and go back to sleep.
But he had not felt able to say no to Balder. He could not understand why. It might have been out of some sense of duty, a feeling that he could not allow himself any easy options now that the magazine was facing a crisis, or it might have been that Balder had sounded lonely and frightened, and that Blomkvist was both sympathetic and curious. Not that he thought he was going to hear anything sensational. He was coldly expecting to be disappointed. Maybe he would find himself acting as a therapist, a night watchman in the storm. On the other hand, one never knew, and once again he thought of Salander. Salander rarely did anything without good reason. Besides, Balder was a fascinating figure, and he had never before given an interview. It could well turn out to be interesting, Blomkvist thought, as he looked about him in the darkness.
A lamp post cast a bluish light over the house, and a nice house it was too, architect-designed with large glass windows, and built to look a little like a train. Standing by the letterbox was a tall policeman in his forties, with a fading tan and somewhat strained, nervous features. Further down the road was a shorter colleague of his, arguing with a drunk who was waving his arms about. More was happening out here than Blomkvist had expected.
“What’s going on?” he said to the taller policeman.
He never got an answer. The policeman’s mobile rang and Blomkvist overheard that the alarm system did not seem to be working properly. There was a noise coming from the lower part of the property, a crackling, unnerving sound, which instinctively he associated with the telephone call. He took a couple of steps to the right and looked down a hill which stretched all the way to a jetty and the sea and another lamp post with the same bluish light. Just then a figure came charging out of nowhere and Blomkvist realized that something was badly wrong.
Holtser squeezed the first pressure on the trigger and was just about to shoot the boy when the sound of a car could be heard up by the road, and he checked himself. But it was not really the car. It was because of the word “disabled” which cropped up again in his thoughts. He realized that the professor would have had every reason to lie in that last moment of his life, but as Holtser now stared at the child he wondered if it might not in fact be true.
The boy’s body was too immobile, and his face radiated wonder rather than fear, as if he had no understanding of what was happening. His look was too blank and glassy to register anything properly.
Holtser recalled something he had read during his research. Balder did have a severely retarded son. Both the press and the court papers had said that the professor did not have custody of the boy. But this must surely be the boy and Holtser neither could nor needed to shoot him. It would be pointless and a breach of his own professional ethics, and this recognition came to him as a huge relief, which should have made him suspicious had he been more aware of himself at that moment.
Now he just lowered the pistol, picked up the computer and the mobile from the bedside table and stuffed them into his rucksack. Then he ran into the night along the escape route he had staked out for himself. But he did not get far. He heard a voice behind him and turned around. Up by the road stood a man who was neither of the policemen but a new figure in a fur coat and fur hat and with quite a different aura of authority. Perhaps this was why Holtser raised his pistol again. He sensed danger.
The man who charged past was athletic and dressed in black, with a headlamp on his cap, and in some way Blomkvist could not quite explain he had the feeling that the figure was part of a coordinated operation. He half expected more figures to appear out of the darkness, and that made him very uncomfortable. He called out, “Hey, you, stop!”
That was a mistake. Blomkvist understood it the instant the man’s body stiffened, like that of a soldier in combat, and that was doubtless why he reacted so quickly. By the time the man drew a weapon and fired a shot as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Blomkvist had already ducked down by the corner of the house. The shot could hardly be heard, but when something smacked into Balder’s letterbox there was no doubt what had happened. The taller of the policemen abruptly ended his call, but did not move a muscle. The only person who said anything was the drunk.
“What the fuck’s going on here? What’s happening?” he roared in a voice which sounded oddly familiar, and only then did the policemen start talking to each other in nervous, low tones:
“Is someone shooting?”
“I think so.”
“What should we do?”
“Call for reinforcements.”
“But he’s getting away.”
“Then we’d better take a look,” the taller one said, and with slow, hesitant movements, they drew their weapons and went down to the water.
A dog could be heard barking in the winter darkness, a small, bad-tempered dog, and the wind was blowing hard from the sea. The snow was whirling about and the ground was slippery. The shorter of the two policemen nearly fell over, and started flailing his arms like a clown. With a bit of luck they might avoid running into the man with the weapon. Blomkvist sensed that the figure would have no trouble at all in getting rid of those two. The quick and efficient way in which he had turned and raised his weapon suggested that he was trained for situations like this, and Blomkvist wondered what he himself should do.
He had nothing with which to defend himself. Yet he got to his feet, brushed the snow from his coat and looked down the slope again. The policemen were working their way along the water’s edge towards the neighbour’s house. There was no sign of the black-clad man with the gun. Blomkvist made his way down too, and as he came around to the front of the house he saw that a window had been smashed in.
There was a large gaping hole in the house and he wondered if he should summon the policemen. He never got that far. He heard something, a strange, low whimpering sound, and so he stepped through the shattered window into a corridor with a fine oak floor whose pale glow could be seen in the darkness. He walked slowly towards a doorway where the sound was coming from.
“Balder,” he called out, “it’s me, Mikael Blomkvist. Is everything alright?”
There was no answer. But the whimpering grew louder. He took a deep breath, walked into the room — and froze, paralysed with shock. Afterwards he could not say what he had noticed first, or even what had frightened him most. It was not necessarily the body on the floor, despite the blood and the empty, rigid expression on its face.
It could have been the scene on the large double bed next to Balder, though it was difficult to make sense of it. There was a small child, perhaps seven, eight years old, a boy with fine features and dishevelled, dark-blonde hair, wearing blue-checked pyjamas, who was banging his body against the headboard and the wall, methodically and with force. The boy’s wailing did not sound like that of a crying child, more like someone trying to hurt himself as much as he could. Before Blomkvist had time to think straight he hurried over to him, but the boy was kicking wildly.
“There,” Blomkvist said. “There, there,” and wrapped his arms around him.
The boy twisted and turned with astonishing strength and managed — possibly because Blomkvist did not want to hold him too tightly — to tear himself from his embrace and rush through the door out into the corridor, barefoot over the glass shards towards the shattered window, with Blomkvist racing after him shouting “No, no.”
That was when he ran into the two policemen. They were standing out in the snow with expressions of total bewilderment.
Chapter 11
Afterwards it was said that the police had a problem with their procedures, and that nothing had been done to cordon off the area until it was too late. The man who shot Professor Balder must have had all the time in the world to make good his escape, and the first policemen on the scene, Detectives Blom and Flinck, known rather scornfully at the station as “the Casanovas”, had taken their time before raising the alarm, or at least had not done so with the necessary urgency or authority.
The forensic technicians and investigators from the Violent Crimes Division arrived only at 3.40, at the same time as a young woman who introduced herself as Gabriella Grane and who was assumed to be a relative because she was so upset. Later they came to understand that she was an analyst from Säpo, sent by the chief of that agency herself. That did not help Grane; thanks to the collective misogyny within the force, or possibly to underline the fact that she was regarded as an outsider, she was given the task of taking care of the child.
“You look as if you know how to handle this sort of thing,” Erik Zetterlund said. He was the leader of the duty investigating team that night. He had watched Grane bending to examine the cuts in the boy’s feet, and even though she snapped at him and declared that she had other priorities, she gave in when she looked into the boy’s eyes.
August — as he was called — was paralysed by fear and for a long time he sat on the floor at the top of the house, wrapped in a duvet, mechanically moving his hand across a red Persian carpet. Blom, who in other respects had not proved to be very enterprising, managed to find a pair of socks and put sticking plasters on the boy’s feet. They noticed too that he had bruises all over his body and a split lip. According to the journalist Mikael Blomkvist — whose presence created a palpable nervousness in the house — the boy had been throwing himself against the bed and the wall downstairs and had run in bare feet across the broken glass on the ground floor.
Grane, who for some reason was reluctant to introduce herself to Blomkvist, realized at once that August was a witness, but she was not able to establish any sort of rapport with him, nor was she able to give him comfort. Hugs and tenderness of the usual kind were clearly not the right approach. August was at his calmest when Grane simply sat beside him, a little way away, doing her own thing, and only once did he appear to be paying attention. This was when she was speaking on her mobile to Kraft and referred to the house number, 79. She did not give it much thought at the time, and soon after that she reached an agitated Hanna Balder.
Hanna wanted to have her son back at once and told Grane, to her surprise, that she should get out some jigsaw puzzles, particularly the one of the warship Vasa, which she said the boy’s father would have had lying around somewhere. She did not describe her ex-husband as having taken the boy unlawfully, but she had no answer when asked why Westman had been out at the house demanding to have the boy back. It certainly did not seem to be concern for the child that had brought him here.
The fact of the boy’s presence did, however, shed light on some of Grane’s earlier questions. She now understood why Balder had been evasive about certain things, and why he had not wanted to have a guard dog. In the early morning Grane arranged for a psychologist and a doctor to take August to his mother in Vasastan, unless it turned out that he needed more urgent medical attention. Then she was struck by a different thought.
It occurred to her that the motive for murder might not have been to silence Balder. The killer could as easily have been wanting to rob him — not of something as obvious as money, but of his research. Grane had no idea what Balder had been working on during the last year of his life. Perhaps no-one knew. But it was not difficult to imagine what it might have been: most probably a development of his A.I. program, which was already regarded as revolutionary when it was stolen the first time.
His colleagues at Solifon had done everything they could to get a look at it and according to what Balder had once let slip he guarded it as a mother guards her baby, which must mean, Grane thought, that he kept it next to him while he was asleep. So she told Blom to keep an eye on August and went down to the bedroom on the ground floor where, in freezing conditions, the forensic team were working.
“Was there a computer in here?” she said.
The technicians shook their heads and Grane got out her mobile and called Kraft again.
It was soon established that Westman had disappeared. He must have left the scene amid the general turmoil, and that made Zetterlund swear and shout, the more so when it transpired that Westman was not to be found at his home either.
Zetterlund considered putting out a search bulletin, which prompted his young colleague Axel Andersson to enquire whether Westman should be treated as dangerous. Maybe Andersson was unable to tell Westman himself apart from the characters he played on screen. But to give the man his due, the situation was looking increasingly messy.
The murder was evidently no ordinary settling of scores within the family, no booze-up gone wrong, no crime committed in a fit of passion. It was a cold-blooded, well-planned assault. Matters did not improve when the chief of provincial police, Jan-Henrik Rolf, weighed in with his assessment that the killing must be treated as an attack on Swedish industrial interests. Zetterlund was finding himself at the heart of an incident of major domestic political importance and even if he were not the brightest mind in the force he realized that what he did now would have a significant long-term impact.
Zetterlund, who had turned forty-one two days earlier and was still suffering some of the after-effects of his birthday party, had never been close to taking charge of an investigation of this importance. The reason he had now been detailed to do it, if only for a matter of hours, was that there had not been so many competent people on duty during the night and his superior had chosen not to wake the National Murder Squad or any of the more experienced investigators in the Stockholm police.
Accordingly Zetterlund found himself in the midst of this confusion, feeling less and less sure of himself, and was soon shouting out his orders. To begin with he was trying to set in train an effective door-to-door enquiry. He wanted rapidly to gather as much testimony as possible, even if he was not expecting to get very much out of it. It was night-time, and dark, and there was a storm blowing. The people living nearby had most likely not seen anything at all. But you never knew. So he had himself questioned Blomkvist, though God only knew what he was doing there.
The presence of one of Sweden’s best-known journalists did not make matters any easier and for a while Zetterlund imagined that Blomkvist was examining him critically with a view to writing a tell-all. Probably that was just his insecurity. Blomkvist himself was shaken and throughout the interview he was unfailingly polite and keen to help. But he was not able to provide much in the way of information. It had all happened so quickly and that in itself was significant, the journalist told him.
There had been something brutal and efficient about the way in which the suspect moved, and Blomkvist said that it would not be too far-fetched to speculate that the man either was or had been a soldier, possibly even special forces. His way of spinning around to aim and fire his weapon had seemed practised. He had a lamp strapped to his tight-fitting black cap, and Blomkvist had not been able to make out any of his features.
He had been too far away, he said, and had thrown himself to the ground in the instant the figure had turned around. He should thank his lucky stars that he was still alive. He could only describe the body and the clothes, and that he did very well. According to the journalist, the man did not seem all that young, he could have been over forty. He was fit and taller than average, between 185 and 195 centimetres, powerfully built with a slim waist and broad shoulders, wearing boots and black, military-style clothes. He was carrying a rucksack and looked to have a knife strapped to his right leg.
Blomkvist thought that the man had vanished down to and along the water’s edge, past the neighbouring houses, and that also matched Blom’s and Flinck’s accounts. The policemen had admittedly not seen the man at all. But they had heard his footsteps disappearing down along the sea and set off in vain pursuit, or so they claimed. Zetterlund had his doubts about that.
He presumed Blom and Flinck had chickened out, and had stood there in the darkness, fearful and doing nothing. In any event, that was the moment when the big mistake was made. Instead of identifying escape routes from the area and trying to cordon it off, nothing much seems to have happened. At that point Flinck and Blom were not yet aware that someone had been killed and as soon as they knew they had had their hands full coping with a barefoot boy running hysterically out of the house. Certainly it cannot have been easy to keep a cool head. Yet they had lost precious time and, though Blomkvist exercised restraint when describing the events, it was plain to see that even he was critical. He had twice asked the policemen if they had sounded the alarm and got a nod for an answer.
Later on, when Blomkvist overheard a conversation between Flinck and the operations centre, he realized that the nod was most likely a no, or at best some sort of bewildered failure to grasp the enormity of what had happened. It had taken a long time for the alarm to be raised and even then things had not proceeded as they should have, probably because Flinck’s account of the situation had not been clear.
The paralysis had spread to other levels. Zetterlund was infinitely glad he could not be blamed for that — at that point he had not yet become involved in the investigation. On the other hand he was here, and he should at least try to avoid making a mess of things. His personal record had not been so impressive recently and this was an opportunity to put his best foot forward.
He was at the door to the living room and had just finished a call to Milton Security about the character who had been seen on the security camera earlier that night. He did not at all fit the description Mikael Blomkvist had given of the presumed murderer. He looked like a skinny old junkie, albeit one who must have possessed a high level of technical skill. Milton Security believed that the man had hacked the alarm system and put all the cameras and sensors out of action.
That certainly did not make matters any easier. It was not only the professional planning. It was the idea of committing a murder in spite of police protection and a sophisticated alarm system. How arrogant is that? Zetterlund had been about to go down to the forensic team on the ground floor, but he stayed upstairs, deeply troubled, staring into space until his gaze fastened on Balder’s son. He was their key witness but incapable of speech, nor did he understand a word they said. In other words pretty much what one might expect in this shambles.
The boy was holding a small, single piece of an extremely complex puzzle. Zetterlund started towards the curved staircase leading to the ground floor — then he stopped dead. He thought back to his initial impression of the child. When he arrived on the scene, not knowing very much about what had happened, the boy had seemed the same as any other child. Zetterlund would have described him as an unusually pretty but normal-looking boy with curly hair and a shocked look in his eyes. Only later did he learn that the boy was autistic and severely handicapped. That, he thought, meant that the murderer either knew him from before or else was aware of his condition. Otherwise he would hardly have let him live and risk being identified in a witness parade, would he? Although Zetterlund did not give himself time to think this through in full, the hunch excited him and he took a few hurried paces towards the boy.
“We must question him at once,” he said, in a voice that came out louder and more urgent than he had intended.
“For heaven’s sake, take it easy with him,” Blomkvist said.
“Don’t you interfere,” Zetterlund snapped. “He may have known the killer. We have to get out some pictures and show them to him. Somehow we must...”
The boy interrupted him by slamming the puzzle with his hand in a sudden sweeping movement. Zetterlund muttered an apology and went downstairs to join his forensic team.
Blomkvist remained there, looking at the boy. It felt as if something else was about to happen with him, perhaps a new outburst, and the last thing he wanted was for the child to hurt himself again. The boy stiffened and began to make furiously rapid circular movements over the rug with his right hand.
Then he stopped and looked up pleadingly. Though Blomkvist asked himself what that might mean, he dropped the thought when the policeman whose name he now knew to be Blom sat down with the boy and tried to get him to do the puzzle again. Blomkvist went into the kitchen to get some peace and quiet. He was exhausted and wanted to go home. But apparently he first had to look at some pictures from a surveillance camera. He had no idea when that was going to happen. It was all taking a long time and seemed disorganized, and Blomkvist was longing for his bed.
He had spoken to Berger twice by then and told her what had happened. They agreed that Blomkvist should write a longer piece about the murder for the next issue. Not just because the crime itself was obviously a major drama and Professor Balder’s life was worth describing, but Blomkvist had a personal connection to the story and that would raise its quality and give him an advantage over the competition. The dramatic telephone call alone, in the middle of the night, which had got him here in the first place, would give his article an edge.
The Serner situation and the crisis at the magazine were implicit in their conversation. Berger had already planned for their temp Andrei Zander to do the preliminary research while Blomkvist got some sleep. She had said rather firmly — like someone halfway between a loving mother and an authoritative editor-in-chief — that she refused to have her star reporter dead from exhaustion before the work had even begun.
Blomkvist accepted without protest. Zander was ambitious and amicable and it would be nice to wake up and find all the spadework done, ideally also with lists of people close to Balder whom he should be interviewing. For a little while Blomkvist welcomed the distraction of reflecting on Zander’s persistent problems with women, which had been confided to him during evening sessions at the Kvarnen beer hall. Zander was young, intelligent and handsome. He ought to be a catch. But because there was something soft and needy in his character, he was time and again being dumped, and that was painful for him. Zander was an incorrigible romantic, forever dreaming about the big scoop and love with a capital L.
Blomkvist sat down at Balder’s kitchen table and looked out at the darkness. In front of him, next to a matchbox, a copy of the New Scientist and a pad of paper with some incomprehensible equations on it, lay a beautiful but slightly ominous drawing of a street crossing. A man with watery, squinting eyes and thin lips was standing next to a traffic light. He was caught in a fleeting moment and yet you could see every wrinkle in his face and the folds in his quilted jacket and trousers. He did not look pleasant. He had a heart-shaped mole on his chin.
Yet the striking thing about the drawing was the traffic light. It shone with an eloquent, troubling glow, and was skilfully executed according to some sort of mathematical technique. You could almost see the underlying geometrical lines. Balder must have enjoyed doing drawings on the side. Blomkvist wondered, though, about the unconventional choice of subject. On the other hand, why would a person like Balder draw sunsets and ships? A traffic light was probably just as interesting to him as anything else. Blomkvist was intrigued by the fact that the drawing looked like a snapshot. Even if Balder had sat and studied the traffic light, he could hardly have asked the man to cross the street over and over again. Maybe he was imagined, or Balder had a photographic memory, just like... Blomkvist grew thoughtful. He picked up his mobile and for the third time called Berger.
“Are you on your way home?” she asked.
“Not yet, unfortunately. There are a couple of things I still need to look at. But I’d like you to do me a favour.”
“What else am I here for?”
“Could you go to my computer and log in? You know my password, don’t you?”
“I know everything about you.”
“Then go into Documents and open a file called LISBETH STUFF.”
“I think I have an idea where this is going.”
“Oh? Here’s what I’d like you to write...”
“Wait a second, I have to open it first. O.K., now... Hold on, there are already a few things here.”
“Ignore them. This is what I want, right at the top. Are you with me?”
“Yes, I’m with you.”
“Write: ‘Lisbeth, maybe you already know, but Frans Balder is dead, shot in the head. Can you find out why someone wanted to kill him?’”
“Is that all?”
“Well, it’s rather a lot considering that we haven’t been in touch for ages. She’ll probably think it’s cheeky of me to ask. But I don’t think it would hurt to have her help.”
“A little illegal hacking wouldn’t go amiss, you mean?”
“I didn’t hear that. I’ll see you soon, I hope.”
“I hope so.”
Salander had managed to go back to sleep, and woke again at 7.30. She was not on top form; she had a headache and she felt nauseous. Yet she felt better than she had in the night. She bandaged her hand, dressed, had a breakfast of two microwaved meat piroshki and a large glass of Coca-Cola, then she stuffed some work-out clothes into a sports bag and left the apartment. The storm had subsided, leaving rubbish and newspapers lying all over the city. She walked down from Mosebacke torg and along Götgatan, muttering to herself.
She looked angry and at least two people were alarmed enough to get out of her way. But Salander was merely determined. She was not looking forward to working out, she just wanted to stick to her routine and drive the toxins out of her body. So she continued down to Hornsgatan, and just before Hornsgatspuckeln she turned into the Zero boxing club, which was down one flight of stairs in the basement. It seemed more run-down than ever that morning.
The place could have used a coat of paint and some general freshening up. It seemed as if no improvements had been made since the ’70s. Posters of Ali and Foreman were still on the walls. It looked just like the day after that legendary bout in Kinshasa, possibly due to the fact that Obinze, the man in charge of the premises, had seen the fight live as a small boy and had afterwards run around in the liberating monsoon rain shouting “Ali Bomaye!” That double-time canter was not just his happiest memory, it also marked what he called the last moment of “the days of innocence”.
Not long after he and his family had been forced to flee Mobutu’s terror and nothing had ever been the same again. Maybe it was not so strange that he wanted to preserve that moment in history, carry it with him to this godforsaken boxing hall in the Södermalm district of Stockholm. Obinze was still constantly talking about the fight. But then he was always constantly talking about something or other.
He was tall and mighty and bald-headed, a chatterbox of epic proportions and one of many in the gym who quite fancied Salander, even if like many others he thought she was more or less crazy. Periodically she would train harder than anyone else in there and go at the punch-balls, punchbags and her sparring partners like a madwoman. She possessed a kind of primitive, furious energy which Obinze had seldom come across.
Once, before he got to know her, he had suggested that she take up competitive boxing. The derisive snort he got in response stopped him from asking again, though he had never understood why she trained so hard. Not that he really needed to know — one could train hard for no reason at all. It was better than drinking hard. It was better than lots of things.
Maybe it was true, as she said to him late one evening about a year ago, that she wanted to be physically prepared in case she ever ended up in difficulties again. He knew that there had been trouble before. He had read every single word about her on the net and understood what it meant to be prepared in case some evil shadow from the past turned up. Both his parents had been murdered by Mobutu’s thugs.
What he did not understand was why, at regular intervals, Salander gave up training altogether, not exercising at all, eating nothing but junk food. When she came into the gym that morning — as demonstratively dressed in black and pierced as ever — he had not seen her for two weeks.
“Hello, gorgeous. Where have you been?”
“Doing something highly illegal.”
“I can just imagine. Beating the crap out of some motorbike gang or something.”
But she did not even rise to the jest. She just marched angrily in towards the changing room and he did something he knew she would hate: he stepped in front of her and looked her straight in the face.
“Your eyes are bright red.”
“I’ve got the mother of all hangovers. Out of my way!”
“In that case I don’t want to see you in here, you know that.”
“Skip the crap. I want you to drive the shit out of me,” she spat, and ducked past him to get changed. When she emerged wearing her outsized boxing shorts and white vest with the black skull on the chest, he saw nothing for it but to go ahead and let her have it.
He pushed her until she threw up three times in his waste-paper bin. He gave her as much grief as he could. She gave him plenty of lip back. Then she went off and changed and left the gym without even a goodbye. As so often at such moments Obinze was overcome by a feeling of emptiness. Maybe he was even a little in love. He was certainly stirred — how could one not be by a girl who boxed like that?
The last he saw of her was her calves disappearing up the stairs so he could not know that the ground swayed beneath her feet as she came out onto Hornsgatan. Salander braced herself against the wall of the building and breathed heavily. Then she set off in the direction of her apartment on Fiskargatan. Once home she drank another large glass of Coca-Cola and half a litre of juice, then she crashed onto her bed and looked at the ceiling for ten, fifteen minutes, thinking about this and that, about singularities and event horizons and certain special aspects of Schrödinger’s equation, and Ed Needham.
She waited for the world to regain its usual colours before she got up and went to her computer. However reluctant she might be, she was drawn to it by a force which had not grown weaker since her childhood. But this morning she was not in the mood for any wild escapades. She hacked into Mikael Blomkvist’s computer. In the next moment she froze. They had been joking about Balder and now Blomkvist wrote that he had been murdered, shot in the head.
“Jesus,” she muttered and had a look at the online evening papers.
There was no explicit mention of Balder, but it was not difficult to work out that the “Swedish academic shot at his home in Saltsjöbaden” was indeed him. For the time being, the police were being tight-lipped and journalists had not managed to turn up a great deal, no doubt because they had not yet cottoned on to how big the story was. Other events from the night took precedence: the storm and the power outage right across the country and the scandalous delays on the railways. There was also the odd celebrity news item which Salander could not be bothered to try to understand.
The only facts reported on the murder were that it had taken place around 3.00 in the morning and that the police were seeking witnesses in the neighbourhood, for reports of anything untoward. So far there were no suspects, but apparently witnesses had spotted unknown and suspicious persons on the property. The police were looking for more information on them. At the end of the articles it said that a press conference was going to be held later that day, led by Chief Inspector Jan Bublanski. Salander gave a wistful smile. She had had a fair bit of history with Bublanski — or Officer Bubble, as he was sometimes called — and she thought that so long as they didn’t put any idiots onto his team the investigation would turn out to be reasonably effective.
Then she read Blomkvist’s message again. He needed help and without thinking twice she wrote “O.K.”, not only because it was he who was asking. It was personal. She did not do grief, at least not in the conventional way. Anger, on the other hand, yes, a cold ticking rage. And though she had a certain respect for Jan Bublanski she was not usually inclined to trust the forces of law and order.
She was used to taking matters into her own hands and she had all sorts of reasons to want to find out why Frans Balder had been murdered. Because it was no coincidence that she had sought him out and taken an interest in his situation. His enemies were most likely her enemies too.
It had begun with the old question of whether in some sense her father lived on. Alexander Zalachenko — Zala — had not only killed her mother and destroyed her childhood, he had also established and controlled a criminal network, sold drugs and arms and made a living exploiting and humiliating women. She was convinced that that sort of evil never goes away. It merely migrates into other forms. Ever since that day just over a year ago when she had woken up at dawn at Hotel Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps, Salander had been pursuing her own investigation into what had become of his legacy.
For the most part his old comrades seemed to have turned into losers, depraved bandits, revolting pimps or small-time crooks. Not one of them was a villain on her father’s level, and for a long time Salander remained convinced that the organization had changed and dissolved after Zalachenko’s death. Yet she did not give up, and eventually she stumbled on something which pointed in a wholly unexpected direction. It was a reference to one of Zala’s young acolytes, a man called Sigfrid Gruber.
Already during Zala’s lifetime, Gruber was one of the more intelligent people in the network, and unlike his colleagues he had earned himself degrees in both computer science and business administration, which had apparently given him access to more exclusive circles. These days he cropped up in a couple of alleged crimes against high-tech companies: thefts of new technology, extortion, insider trading, hacker attacks.
Normally, Salander would have followed the lead no further. Not just because it seemed to have little to do with her father’s old activities. Also, nothing could worry her less than a couple of rich business groups being fleeced of some of their innovations. But then everything had changed.
In a classified report from Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, England, which she had got her hands on, she had come across some codenames associated with a gang Gruber seemed now to belong to. The names had set some bells ringing, and after that she had not been able to let go of the story. She put together all the information she could find about the group and kept coming across a rumour that the organization had stolen Balder’s A.I. technology, and then sold it to the Russian — American games company, Truegames. Her source was unreliable — a half-open hacker site — but it was for this reason that she had turned up at the professor’s lecture at the Royal Institute of Technology and given him a hard time about singularities deep within black holes. Or that was part of the reason.
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