The Girl in the Spider's Web

Sometimes it is easier to put together than to put asunder.

Nowadays computers can easily multiply prime numbers with millions of digits. Yet it is extremely complicated to reverse the process. Numbers with only a few hundred digits present huge problems.

Encryption algorithms like R.S.A. take advantage of the difficulties involved in prime-number factorization. Prime numbers have become secrecy’s best friends.

Chapter 25

It had not taken long for Salander to identify the Roger whom August had been drawing. She had seen a younger version of the man on a website showing former actors from Revolutionsteatern in Vasastan. He was called Roger Winter. He had had a couple of major film roles at the beginning of his career, but lately had fetched up in a backwater, and was now less well known than his wheelchair-bound brother Tobias, an outspoken professor of biology who was said these days to have distanced himself altogether from Roger.

Salander wrote down Roger Winter’s address and then hacked into the supercomputer N.S.F. M.R.I. She also opened the program with which she was trying to construct a dynamic system for finding the elliptic curves which were most likely to do the job, and with as few iterations as possible. But whatever she tried, she was unable to get any closer to a solution. The N.S.A. file remained impenetrable. In the end she went and looked in on August. She swore. The boy was awake, sitting up in bed writing something on a piece of paper, and as she came closer she could see that he was doing more prime-number factorizations.

“It’s no good. It’s not getting us anywhere,” she muttered, and when August began to rock to and fro hysterically once again she told him to pull himself together and go back to sleep.

It was late and she decided that she too should rest for a while. She took the bed next to his, but it was impossible to sleep. August tossed and turned and whimpered, and in the end Salander decided to say something, to try to settle him. The best she could think of was, “Do you know about elliptic curves?”

Of course she got no answer. That did not deter her from giving as simple and clear an explanation as she could.

“Do you get it?” she said.

August did not reply.

“O.K., then,” she went on. “Take the number 3,034,267, for example. I know you can easily find its prime-number factors. But it can also be done using elliptic curves. Let’s for example take curve y = x³ — x + 4 and point P = (1.2) on that curve.”

She wrote the equation on a piece of paper on the bedside table. But August did not seem to be following at all. She thought about those autistic twins she had read up on. They had some mysterious way of identifying large prime numbers, yet could not solve the simplest equations. Perhaps August was like that too. Perhaps he was more of a calculating machine than a genuine mathematical talent, and in any case it didn’t matter right now. Her bullet wound was aching again and she needed some sleep. She needed to drive out all her old childhood demons which had come to life again because of the boy.

It was past midnight by the time Blomkvist got home and, even though he was exhausted and had to get up at the crack of dawn, he sat down at his computer and Googled Edwin Needham. There were quite a few Edwin Needhams in the world, including a successful rugby player who had made an extraordinary comeback having had leukaemia.

There was one Edwin Needham who seemed to be an expert on water purification, and another who was good at getting himself into society photographs and looking daft. But none of them seemed right for someone who could have been involved in cracking Wasp’s identity and accusing her of criminal activity. There was an Edwin Needham who was a computer engineer with a Ph.D. from M.I.T., and that was at least the right line of business, but not even he seemed to fit. He was now a senior executive at Safeline, a leading business in computer virus protection, and that company would certainly have an interest in hackers. But the statements made by this Ed, as he was known, were all about market share and new products. Nothing he said rated higher than the usual clichéd sales talk, not even when he got the chance to talk about his leisure pursuits: bowling and fly fishing. He loved nature, he said, he loved the competitive aspect... The most threatening thing he seemed capable of doing was boring people to death.

There was a picture of him, grinning and bare-chested, holding up a large salmon, the sort of snap which are a dime a dozen in fishing circles. It was as dull as everything else, and yet gradually Blomkvist began to wonder whether the dullness might not be the whole point. He read through the material again and this time it struck him as something concocted, a facade. Slowly but surely he came to the opposite conclusion: this was the man. You could smell the intelligence services a mile off, couldn’t you? It felt like N.S.A. or C.I.A. Once again he looked at the photograph with the salmon, and this time he thought he saw something very different.

He saw a tough guy putting on an act. There was something unwavering about the way he stood and his mocking grin into the camera, at least that is what Blomkvist imagined, and again he thought of Salander. He wondered if he ought to tell her about this meeting. But there was no reason to worry her now, especially since he did not actually know anything, so instead he decided to go to bed. He needed to sleep for a few hours and have a clear head when he met Needham in the morning. As he slowly brushed his teeth and undressed and climbed into bed, he realized he was more tired than he could have imagined and fell asleep in no time. He dreamed that he was being dragged under and almost drowned in the river Needham had been standing in. Afterwards he had a vague image of himself crawling along the riverbed surrounded by flopping, thrashing salmon. But he cannot have slept for long. He woke with a start and the growing conviction that he had overlooked something. His mobile was lying on the bedside table and his thoughts turned to Zander. The young man must have been on his mind all along.

Linda had double-locked the door. There was nothing odd about that — a woman in her situation had to take all possible precautions. It still made Zander feel uncomfortable, but he put that down to the apartment, or so he tried to convince himself. It was not at all what he had been expecting. Could this really be the home of one of her girlfriends?

The bed was broad but not especially long, and both the headboard and the footboard were made of shiny steel latticework. The bedspread was black, which made him think of a bier, and he disliked the pictures on the walls — mostly framed photographs of men with weapons. There was a sterile, chilly feel to the whole place.

On the other hand he was probably just nervous and exaggerating everything, or looking for an excuse to get away. A man always wants to escape the thing he loves — hadn’t Oscar Wilde said something like that? He looked at Linda. Never before had he seen such an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and now she was coming towards him in her tight blue dress which accentuated her figure. As if she had been reading his mind she said, “Would you rather go home, Andrei?”

“I do have quite a lot on my plate.”

“I understand,” she said, kissing him. “Then you must of course go and get on with your work.”

“Maybe that would be best,” he muttered as she pressed herself against him, kissing him with such force that he had no defence.

He responded to her kiss and put his hands on her hips, and she gave him a shove. She pushed him so hard that he staggered and fell backwards onto the bed, and for a moment he was scared. But then he looked at her. She was smiling as tenderly now as before and he thought: this was nothing more than a bit of rough play. She really wanted him, didn’t she? She wanted to make love with him there and then, and he let her straddle his body, unbutton his shirt, and draw her fingernails over his stomach while her eyes shone with an intense glow and her large breasts heaved beneath her dress. Her mouth was open. A trickle of saliva ran down her chin and she whispered something he could not at first hear. “Now, Andrei,” she whispered again. “Now!”

“Now?” he repeated uncertainly, and felt her tearing off his trousers. She was more brazen than he had expected, more accomplished and wildly lascivious than anybody he had met.

“Close your eyes and lie absolutely still,” she said.

He obeyed and could hear her fiddling with something, he was not sure what. Then heard a click and felt metal around his wrists, and realized he had been handcuffed. He was about to protest, he did not really go in for that sort of thing, but it all happened so fast. With lightning speed, as if she had done it many times, she locked his hands to the headboard. Then she bound his feet with rope and pulled tight.

“Gently,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” but then she gave him a look he did not like and said something in a solemn voice. He must have misheard. “What?” he said.

“I’m going to cut you with a knife, Andrei,” she said, and fixed a broad piece of tape across his mouth.

Blomkvist was trying to tell himself not to worry. Why would anything have happened to Zander? No-one — apart from Berger and himself — knew that he was involved in protecting the whereabouts of Salander and the boy. They had been extremely careful with that piece of information, more careful than with any other part of the story. And yet... why had there been no word from him?

Zander was not someone who ignored his mobile. On the contrary, he normally picked up on the first ring whenever Blomkvist called. But now there was no way of getting hold of him, and that was strange, wasn’t it? Or maybe... again Blomkvist tried to convince himself that Zander was busy working and had lost track of time, or in the worst case had dropped his mobile. That was probably all it was. But still... after all these years Camilla had appeared out of nowhere. Something must be going on, and what was it Bublanski had said?

“We live in a world in which paranoia is a requirement.”

Blomkvist reached for the telephone on the bedside table and called Zander again. He got no answer this time either, so decided to wake their new staff member, Emil Grandén, who lived near Zander in the Röda bergen area of Vasastan. Grandén sounded less than enthusiastic but promised to go over to Zander’s right away to see if he was there. Twenty minutes later he rang back. He had been banging on Zander’s door for a while, he said, and he definitely wasn’t at home.

Blomkvist got dressed and left his apartment, hurrying through a deserted and storm-lashed Södermalm district up to the magazine offices on Götgatan. With any luck, he thought, Zander would be lying asleep on the sofa. It would not be the first time he had nodded off at work and not heard the telephone. That would be the simple explanation. But Blomkvist felt more and more uneasy. When he opened the door and turned off the alarm he shivered, as if expecting to find a scene of devastation, but after a search of the premises he found no trace of anything untoward. All the information on his encrypted email program had been carefully deleted, just as they had agreed. It all looked as it should, but there was no Zander lying on the office sofa, which was looking as shabby and empty as ever. For a short while Blomkvist sat there, lost in thought. Then he rang Grandén again.

“Emil,” he said, “I’m sorry to harass you like this in the middle of the night. But this whole story has made me paranoid.”

“I can understand that.”

“I couldn’t help hearing that you sounded a bit stressed when I was talking about Andrei. Is there anything you haven’t told me?”

“Nothing you don’t already know,” Grandén said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I’ve spoken to the Data Inspection Authority too.”

“What do you mean, you too?”

“You mean you haven’t—”

“No!” Blomkvist cut him short and heard Grandén’s breathing at the other end of the line become laboured. There had been a terrible mistake.

“Out with it, Emil, and fast,” he said.

“So...”

“Yes?”

“I had a call from a Lina Robertsson at the Data Inspection Authority. She said that you’d spoken and she agreed to raise the level of security on your computer, given the circumstances. Apparently the recommendations she’d given you were wrong and she was worried the protection would be insufficient. She said she wanted to get hold of the person who’d arranged the encryption for you asap.”

“And what did you say?”

“That I knew nothing about it, except that I’d seen Andrei doing something at your computer.”

“So you said she should get in touch with Andrei.”

“I happened to be out at the time and told her that Andrei was probably still in the office. She could ring him there, I said. That was all.”

“Jesus, Emil.”

“But she sounded really—”

“I don’t care how she sounded. I just hope you told Andrei about the call.”

“Maybe not right away. I’m pretty snowed under at the moment, like all of us.”

“But you told him later.”

“Well, he left the office before I got a chance to say anything.”

“So you called him instead.”

“Absolutely, several times. But...”

“Yes?”

“He didn’t answer.”

“O.K.,” Blomkvist said, his voice ice cold.

He hung up and dialled Bublanski’s number. He had to try twice before the chief inspector came to the telephone. Blomkvist had no choice but to tell him the whole story — without discussing Salander and August’s location.

Then he called Berger.

Salander had fallen asleep, but she was still ready for action. She was still in her clothes, with her leather jacket and her boots on. She kept waking up, either because of the howling storm or because August was moaning even in his sleep. But each time she dropped off again, or at least dozed, and had short, strangely realistic dreams.

Now she was dreaming about her father beating her mother, and even then she could feel that old, fierce rage from her childhood. She felt it so keenly that it woke her up again. It was 3.45 and those scraps of paper on which she and August had written their numbers were still lying on the bedside table. Outside, snow was falling. But the storm seemed to have calmed and nothing unusual could be heard, just the wind howling and rustling through the trees.

Yet she felt uneasy, and at first she thought it was the dream lying like a fine mesh over the room. Then she shuddered. The bed next to her was empty — August was gone. She shot out of bed without making a sound, grabbed her Beretta from the bag on the floor and crept into the large room next to the terrace.

The next moment she breathed a sigh of relief. August was sitting at the table, busy with something. Without wanting to disturb him she leaned over his shoulder and saw that he was not writing new prime-number factorizations, or drawing fresh scenes of abuse. He was sketching chess squares reflected in the mirrors of a wardrobe, and above them could be made out a threatening figure with his hand outstretched. The killer was taking shape. Salander smiled, and then she withdrew.

Back in the bedroom she sat on the bed, removed her pullover and the bandage and inspected the bullet wound. It didn’t look good, and she still felt weak. She swallowed another couple of antibiotic pills and tried to rest. She might even have gone back to sleep for a few moments. She was aware of a vague sensation that she had seen both Zala and Camilla in her dream, and the next second she became aware of a presence, though she had no idea what. A bird flapped its wings outside. She could hear August’s laboured breathing in the kitchen. She was just about to get up when a scream pierced the air.

By the time Blomkvist left the office in the early morning hours to take a taxi to the Grand Hôtel, he still had no news of Zander. He tried again to persuade himself that he had been overreacting, that any moment now his colleague would be calling from some friend’s place. But the worry would not go away. He was vaguely aware that it had started snowing again, and that a woman’s shoe had been left lying on the pavement. He took out his Samsung and called Salander on the Redphone app.

Salander did not pick up, and that did not make him any calmer. He tried once more and sent a text from the Threema app: Then he caught sight of a taxi coming down from Hökens gata and noticed the driver give a start when he saw him. At that moment Blomkvist looked dangerously determined. It did not help that he failed to respond to the driver’s attempts to chat. He just sat back in the darkness, his eyes bright with worry.

Stockholm was more or less deserted. The storm had abated but there were still white-crested waves on the water. Blomkvist looked across to the Grand Hôtel on the other side and wondered if he should forget about the meeting with Mr Needham and drive straight out to Salander instead, or at least arrange for a police car to go there. No, he couldn’t do that without warning her. Another leak would be disastrous. He opened the Threema app again and tapped in:

No answer. Of course there was no answer. He paid the fare and climbed out of the taxi, lost in thought. By the time he was pushing through the revolving doors of the hotel it was 4.20 in the morning — he was forty minutes early. He had never been forty minutes early for anything. But he was burning inside and, before going to the reception desk to hand in his mobiles, he called Berger. He told her to try to get hold of Salander and to keep in touch with the police.

“If you hear anything, call the Grand Hôtel and ask for Mr Needham’s room.”

“And who’s he?”

“Someone who wants to meet me.”

“At this time?”

Needham was in room 654. The door opened and there stood a man reeking of sweat and rage. There was about as much resemblance to the figure in the fishing photograph as there would be between a hungover dictator and his stylized statue. Needham had a drink in his hand and looked grim, dishevelled and a little bit like a bulldog.

“Mr Needham,” Blomkvist said.

“Ed,” Needham said. “I’m sorry to haul you over here at this ungodly hour, but it’s urgent.”

“So it would seem,” Blomkvist said drily.

“Do you have any idea what I want to talk to you about?”

Blomkvist shook his head and sat down on a sofa. There was a bottle of gin and some small bottles of Schweppes tonic on the desk next to it.

“No indeed, why would you?” Needham said. “On the other hand it’s impossible to know with guys like you. I’ve checked you out. You should know that I hate to flatter people — it leaves a bad taste in my mouth — but you’re pretty outstanding in your profession, aren’t you?”

Blomkvist gave a forced smile. “Can we just get to the point?” he said.

“Just relax. I’ll be crystal clear. I assume you know where I work.”

“Not exactly,” he said truthfully.

“In Puzzle Palace, SIG.INT. City. I work for the world’s spittoon.”

“The N.S.A.”

“Damn right. Do you have any idea how fucking insane you have to be to mess with us, Mikael Blomkvist? Do you?”

“I have a pretty good idea,” he said.

“And do you know where I think your girlfriend really belongs?”

“No.”

“She belongs behind bars. For life!”

Blomkvist gave what he hoped was a calm, composed little smile. But in fact his mind was spinning. Did Salander hack the N.S.A.? The mere thought terrified him. Not only was she in hiding, with killers on the hunt for her. Was she also going to have the entire U.S. intelligence shock troops descend on her? It sounded... well, how did it sound? It sounded totally off the wall.

One of Salander’s abiding characteristics was that she never did anything without first carefully analysing the potential consequences. She did not follow impulses or whims and therefore he could not imagine she would take such an idiotic risk if there was the slightest chance of being found out. Sometimes she put herself in danger, that was true, but there was always a balance between costs and benefits. He refused to believe that she had got herself into the N.S.A.’s systems, only to allow herself to be outwitted by the splenetic bulldog standing in front of him.

“I think you’re jumping to conclusions,” he said.

“Dream on, dude. But you heard me use the word ‘really’ just then. Some word, hey? Can be used in all sorts of ways. I don’t really drink in the mornings, and yet here I am with a glass in my hand, ha ha! What I’m trying to say is that you might be able to save your girlfriend’s skin if you promise to help me with one or two things.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Peachy. Let me begin by asking for a guarantee that you’ll not quote me as your source.”

Blomkvist looked at him in surprise. He had not expected that.

“Are you some kind of whistleblower?”

“God help me, no. I’m a loyal old bloodhound.”

“But you’re not acting officially on behalf of the N.S.A.”

“You could say that right now I have my own agenda. Sort of doing my own thing. Well, how about it?”

“I won’t quote you.”

“Great. I also want to make sure we agree that what I’m going to tell you now will stay between us. You might be wondering why the hell I’m telling a fantastic story to an investigative journalist, only to have him keep his trap shut.”

“Good question.”

“I have my reasons. And I trust you — don’t ask me why. I’m betting that you want to protect your girlfriend, and you think the real story is elsewhere. Maybe I’ll even help you with that, if you’re prepared to cooperate.”

“That remains to be seen,” Blomkvist said stiffly.

“Well, a few days ago we had a data breach on our intranet, our NSANet. You know about that, don’t you?”

“More or less.”

“NSANet was created after 9/11, to improve coordination between our own intelligence services on the one hand and those in other English-speaking countries — known as the Five Eyes. It’s a closed system, with its own routers, portals and bridges, and it’s completely separate from the rest of the Internet. We administer our signals intelligence from there via satellite and fibre-optic cables and that’s also where we have our big databases and store classified analyses and reports — from Moray-rated documents, the least sensitive, all the way up to Umbra Ultra Top Secret, which even the President of the United States isn’t allowed to see. The system is run out of Texas, which by the way is idiotic. But it’s still my baby. Let me tell you, Mikael, I worked my ass off to create it. Hammered away at it day and night so that no fucker could misuse it, never mind hack it. Every single little anomaly sets alarm bells ringing, plus there’s a whole staff of independent experts monitoring the system. These days you can’t do a goddamn thing on the web without leaving footprints. At least that’s the theory. Everything is logged and analysed. You shouldn’t be able to touch a single key without it triggering a notification. But...”

“Somebody did.”

“Yes, and maybe I could have made my peace with it. There are always weak spots, we can always do better. Weak spots keep us on our toes. But it wasn’t just the fact that she managed to get in. It was how she did it. She forced our server and created an advanced bridge, and got into the intranet via one of our systems administrators. That alone was a damn masterpiece. But that wasn’t all, not by a long chalk: then the bitch turned herself into a ghost user.”

“A what?”

“A ghost. She flew around in there without anyone noticing.”

“And your alarm bells didn’t go off?”

“That damn genius introduced a Trojan unlike anything else we knew, because otherwise our system would have identified it right away. The malware then kept upgrading her status. She got more and more access and soaked up highly classified passwords and codes and started to link and match records and databases, and suddenly — bingo!”

“Bingo what?”

“She found what she was looking for, and then she stopped wanting to be invisible — now she wanted to show us what she’d found, and only then did my alarm bells go off: exactly when she wanted them to.”

“And what did she find?”

“She found our hypocrisy, Mikael, our double-dealing, and that’s why I’m sitting here with you and not on my fat ass in Maryland, sending the Marines after her. She was like a thief breaking into a house just to point out that it was already full of stolen goods, and the minute we found that out she became truly dangerous — so dangerous that some of our senior people wanted to let her off.”

“But not you.”

“Not me. I wanted to tie her to a lamp post and flay her alive. But I had no choice except to give up my pursuit, and that, Mikael, seriously pissed me off. I may look calm now, but you should have seen me... Jesus!”

“You were hopping mad.”

“Damn right I was, and that’s why I’ve had you come here at this godforsaken hour. I need to get hold of Wasp before she flees the country.”

“Why would she run?”

“Because she’s gone from one crazy thing to the next, hasn’t she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

“And what makes you think she’s your hacker in the first place?”

“That, Mikael, is what I’m going to lay on you now.”

But he got no further.

The room telephone rang and Needham picked up right away. It was reception looking for Mikael Blomkvist, and Needham handed him the receiver. He soon gathered that the journalist had been given some alarming news, so it was no surprise when the Swede muttered a confused apology and ran out of the room. But Needham would not let him get away that easily, and so he grabbed his coat and chased after him.

Blomkvist was racing down the corridor like a sprinter. Needham did not know what was going on, but if it had something to do with the Wasp/Balder story, he wanted to be there. He had some trouble keeping up — the journalist was in too much of a hurry to wait for the lift and instead hurtled down the stairs. By the time Needham reached the ground floor, panting, Blomkvist had already retrieved his mobiles and was engrossed in another conversation while he ran on towards the revolving doors and out into the street.

“What’s happening?” Needham said as the journalist ended his call and was trying to hail a taxi on the street.

“Problems!” Blomkvist said.

“I can drive you.”

“Like hell you can. You’ve been drinking.”

“At least we can take my car.”

Blomkvist slowed his pace and turned to Needham.

“What is it you want?”

“I want us to help each other.”

“You’ll have to catch your hacker on your own.”

“I no longer have the authority to catch anybody.”

“O.K., so where’s the car?”

As they ran to Needham’s rental car parked over by the Nationalmuseum, Blomkvist hurriedly explained that they were heading out to the Stockholm archipelago, towards Ingarö. He would get directions on the way and was not planning to observe any speed limits.

Chapter 26

August screamed, and in the same instant Salander heard footsteps, rapid footsteps along the side of the house. She grabbed her pistol and jumped to her feet. She felt terrible, but ignored it.

As she rushed over to the doorway she saw a large man appear on the terrace. For a moment she thought she had a split-second advantage, but the figure did not stop to open the glass doors. He charged straight through them with his weapon drawn and shot at the boy.

Salander returned fire, or perhaps she had already done so, she did not know. She was not even conscious of the moment in which she started running towards the man. She only knew that she crashed into him with numbing force and now lay on top of him right by the round table where the boy had been sitting moments before. Without a second’s hesitation she headbutted the man.

The contact was so violent that her head rang, and she swayed as she got to her feet. The room was spinning and there was blood on her shirt. Had she been hit again? She had no time to think. Where was August? No-one at the table, only pencils and drawings, crayons, prime-number calculations. Where the hell was he? She heard a whimpering by the refrigerator and, yes, there he was, sitting and shaking, his knees drawn up to his chest. He must have had time to throw himself to the floor.

Salander was about to rush over to him when she heard new, worrying sounds from outside, voices and branches snapping. Others were approaching, there was no time to lose. They had to be away from here. In a blinding flash she visualized the surrounding terrain and raced over to August. “Come on!” she said. August did not budge. Salander picked him up in one swift movement, her face twisted in pain. Every movement hurt. But they had to get away and August must have understood that too because he wriggled out of her grasp. So she sprang over to the table, grabbed her computer and August’s coat, and made for the terrace, past the man on the floor who raised himself groggily and tried to catch hold of August’s leg as he ran alongside her.

Salander considered killing him. Instead she kicked him hard in the throat and stomach and threw away his weapon. Then she ran across the terrace with August and down towards the steep rocky slope. But suddenly she thought of the drawing. She had not seen how far the boy had got with it. Should she go back? No, the others would be here any moment. They had to get away. But still... the drawing was also a weapon, and the cause of all this madness. She left August with her computer on the rock ledge she had identified the night before. She then launched herself back up the slope and into the house and looked on the table. At first she could not see it. Drawings of that bastard Westman were everywhere, and rows of prime numbers.

But there — there it was, and above the chess squares and the mirrors there was now a pale figure with a sharply defined scar on his forehead, which Salander by now recognized only too well. It was the same man who was lying on the floor in front of her, moaning. She whipped out her mobile, took a photograph and sent it to Bublanski and Modig. She had even scribbled a line at the top of the paper. But a second later she realized that was a mistake.

They were surrounded.

Salander had sent the same word to his Samsung as she had to Berger: . It hardly left room for misunderstanding, not coming from Salander. However Blomkvist looked at it, it could only mean that she and August had been discovered, and at worst they were under attack even now. He floored the accelerator as he passed Stadsgårdskajen and emerged onto the Värmdö road.

He was driving a brand-new Audi A8, with Needham sitting next to him. Needham looked grim, and every now and then tapped something into his mobile. Blomkvist was not sure why he had allowed him to come along — maybe he wanted to discover what the man had on Salander, or no, there was something else as well. Maybe Needham could even be useful. In any case he could hardly make the situation any worse. The police had by now been alerted, but he doubted they would able to assemble a unit quickly enough — especially as they were sceptical about the lack of information. Berger had been the focal point, trying to keep them all in contact with each other, and she was the only one who knew the way. He needed all the help he could get.

He was approaching Danviksbron. Needham said something, he did not hear what. His thoughts were elsewhere. He thought of Zander — what had they done to him? Why the hell had he not come out for a beer? Blomkvist tried his number again. He tried calling Salander too. But nobody answered.

“Do you want me to tell you what we have on your hacker?” Needham said.

“Yes... why not?”

But they did not get anywhere this time either. Blomkvist’s mobile rang. Bublanski.

“I hope you realize that you and I are going to have a lot to talk about later, and you can count on there being legal consequences.”

“I hear you.”

“But for now I’m calling to give you some information. We know that Lisbeth Salander was alive at 4.22. Was that before or after she texted you?”

“Before, it must have been before.”

“O.K.”

“How can you be so specific about the time?”

“She sent us something extremely interesting. A drawing. I have to say, Mikael, it exceeded our hopes.”

“So she got the boy to draw.”

“Oh yes. I have no idea what technical issues might arise in terms of admissibility of evidence, if any, or what objections a clever defence lawyer might raise. But as far as I’m concerned there’s no doubt this is the murderer. It’s incredibly vivid, with that extraordinary mathematical precision again. In fact there’s also an equation written at the bottom of the page, I have no idea if it’s relevant to the case. But I sent the drawing to Interpol. If the man is anywhere in their database, he’s toast.”

“Are you going to send it to the press as well?”

“We’re debating that.”

“When will you be at the scene?”

“As soon as possible... hold on a second!”

Blomkvist could hear another telephone ringing in the background, and for a minute or so Bublanski was gone on another call. When he returned, he said briefly:

“We’ve had reports of gunfire out there. It doesn’t sound good.”

Blomkvist took a deep breath. “Any news on Andrei?” he said.

“We’ve traced his mobile signal to a base station in Gamla Stan, but no further. We’ve had no signal at all for a while now, as if the mobile has been smashed or just stopped working.”

Blomkvist drove even faster; fortunately the roads were empty at that hour. At first he said very little to Needham, just a brief account of what was going on, but in the end he could not hold back. He needed something else to think about.

“So what is it you think you’ve found out?”

“About Wasp? For a long time, zip. We were convinced that we’d reached the end of the line,” Needham said. “We’d left no stone unturned, and still got nowhere. In a way it made sense.”

“How so?”

“A hacker capable of a breach like that should also be able to cover all tracks. I realized pretty soon we wouldn’t get anywhere by conventional means. So I skipped all the forensic bullshit and went straight for the big question: who had the chops to pull this off? That question was our best hope. There’s hardly anyone out there with that level of ability. In that sense, you could say that the hacker’s skill worked against them. Plus, we had analysed the rootkit itself, and that...” Needham looked down at his mobile.

“Yes?”

“It had artistic qualities. Personal style, you might say. Now we just had to find its author, and so we started to send posts to the hacker community, and very soon there was one name, one handle, which came up time after time. Can you guess which one?”

“Maybe.”

“It was Wasp. Sure, there were other names, but Wasp stood out. I ended up hearing so much mythical bullshit about this person that I was dying to crack their identity, and we went right back in time. We read every word Wasp had written online, studied every operation that had Wasp’s signature on it. Soon we were certain that Wasp was a woman, and we guessed that she was Swedish. Several of the early posts were written in Swedish, which isn’t much to go on. But since there was a Swedish connection in the organization she was tracking, and Frans Balder was Swedish, it was at least a good place to start. I got in touch with the N.D.R.E., and they searched their records, and then in fact...”

“What?”

“They had a breakthrough. Many years earlier they’d investigated a hacker operation that used that very handle, Wasp. It was so long ago that Wasp wasn’t yet even particularly good at encryption.”

“What happened?”

“Wasp had been looking for data on individuals who’d defected from other countries’ intelligence services, and that was enough to trigger the N.D.R.E.’s warning system. Their investigation led them to a psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala, to a computer belonging to the head physician there, a man named Teleborian. Apparently he’d done some work for the Swedish Security Police, so he was above suspicion. Instead the N.D.R.E. concentrated on some mental-health nurses who were targeted because they were... well, to be blunt about it, immigrants. It was such a stupid, blinkered strategy. Anyway, nothing came of it.”

“I can imagine.”

“So I asked a guy at the N.D.R.E. to send over all the old material, and we sifted through it with a completely different mindset. You know, you don’t have to be big and fat and shave in the mornings to be a good hacker. I’ve met twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who are crazy good. It was obvious to me that we should look at every child in the clinic at the time. I had three of my guys investigate each one of them, inside and out, and do you know what we found? One of the children was the daughter of former spy and arch-villain Zalachenko, who was known to our colleagues at the C.I.A., and then everything got really interesting. As you probably know, there are some overlaps between the network the hacker was investigating and Zalachenko’s old crime syndicate.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean it was Wasp who hacked you.”

“Of course not. But we took a closer look at this girl, and what can I say? She has an interesting background, doesn’t she? A lot of information about her in the public record has been mysteriously deleted, but we still found more than enough and... I don’t know, I may be wrong, but I get the feeling we’re on the right track. Mikael, you don’t know shit about me. But I know what it’s like for a kid to see extreme violence at close quarters. And I know what it’s like when society doesn’t lift a finger to punish the guilty party. It hurts like hell, and I’m not at all surprised that most children who experience it go under. They turn into destructive bastards themselves.”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“But just a few grow to be as strong as bears, Mikael, and they stand up and fight back. Wasp was one of those, wasn’t she?”

Blomkvist nodded pensively and pressed down on the accelerator a little more.

“They locked her up and kept trying to break her. But she kept coming back, and do you know what I think?”

“No.”

“She got stronger each time. She became positively lethal. She hasn’t forgotten a single thing that happened. It’s all etched into her, isn’t it? And maybe that’s at the bottom of this whole goddamn mess.”

“What is it you want?” Blomkvist said bluntly.

“I want what Wasp wants. I want to set some things right.”

“Plus get your hands on the hacker.”

“I want to meet her and give her a piece of my mind and plug every last damn hole in our security. But above all I want to get my own back on certain people who wouldn’t let me finish my job because Wasp exposed them. I have reason to believe you’re going to help me with that.”

“Why so?”

“Because you’re a fine reporter. Fine reporters don’t want dirty secrets to go on being dirty secrets.”

“And Wasp?”

“Wasp is going to get a chance to do her worst. You’re going to help me with that too.”

“Or else?”

“Or else I’ll find a way of putting her inside, and making her life hell again, I swear.”

“But for now all you want to do is talk to her?”

“No fucker is going to be allowed to hack into my system again, so I need to understand exactly how she did it. I want you to give her that message. I’m prepared to let your girlfriend go free if she’ll sit down with me and explain.”

“I’ll tell her. Let’s just hope...”

“That she’s still alive,” Needham said. They turned left at high speed in the direction of Ingaröstrand.

It was rare for Holtser to get things so wrong.

He had this romantic delusion that you could tell from a distance if a man was likely to succeed in close combat. That was why he had not been surprised when Kira’s attempted seduction of Blomkvist had failed. Orlov and Bogdanov had been completely confident. But Holtser had had his doubts even though he had only seen the journalist for one giddy second in Saltsjöbaden. Blomkvist looked like a problem. He looked like a man who could not be fooled or broken so easily.

With the younger journalist it was different. He looked like the archetypal weakling, yet nothing could have been further from the truth. Zander had resisted for longer than anyone Holtser had ever tortured. Despite excruciating pain he had refused to break. His eyes shone with a grim determination which seemed buttressed by a higher principle, and at one point Holtser thought they would have to give up, that Zander would rather endure any suffering than talk. It was not until Kira solemnly promised that both Berger and Blomkvist from Millennium would be made to suffer as well that Zander finally caved in.

By then it was 3.30 in the morning. Holtser knew that he would always remember the moment. Snow was falling on the skylights. The young man’s face was dried out and hollow-eyed. Blood had splashed up from his chest and flecked his mouth and cheeks. His lips, which for a long time had been covered with tape, were split and oozing. He was a wreck, but still you could tell that he was a beautiful young man.

Holtser thought of Olga — how would she have felt about him? Wasn’t this journalist just the kind of educated man she liked, someone who fights injustice, takes the side of beggars and outcasts? He thought about that, and about other things in his own life. After that he made the sign of the cross, the Russian cross, where one way leads to heaven and the other to hell, and then he glanced over at Kira. She was lovelier than ever.

Her eyes burned with light. She was sitting on a stool by the bed wearing an elegant blue dress — which had largely escaped the bloodstains — and said something in Swedish to Zander, something which sounded soft and tender. Then she took him by the hand. He gripped hers in return. He had nowhere else to turn for comfort. The wind howled outside in the alley. Kira nodded and smiled at Holtser. Snowflakes fell on the window ledge.

Afterwards they were sitting together in a Land Rover on the way out to Ingarö. Holtser felt empty, and was not happy with the way things were going. But there was no getting away from the fact that his own mistake had led them there, so he sat quietly, listening to Kira. She was strangely excited and spoke with searing hatred of the woman they were about to confront. Holtser did not think it was a good sign, and if he could have brought himself to do so he would have urged her to turn back and get the hell out of the country.

But he said nothing as the snow fell and they drove on in the darkness. Kira’s sparkling, cold eyes frightened him, but he pushed away the thought. He had to give her credit at least — she had been amazingly quick to put two and two together.

Not only had she worked out who had hurtled in to save the boy on Sveavägen. She had also guessed who would know where the boy and the woman had disappeared to, and the person she came up with was none other than Mikael Blomkvist. They were baffled by her reasoning. Why would a reputable Swedish journalist harbour a person who appeared from nowhere and abducted a child from a crime scene? But the more they examined the theory, the more it held together. Not only did the woman — whose name was Lisbeth Salander — have close ties to the reporter, but something also happened at the Millennium offices.

After the murder in Saltsjöbaden, Bogdanov had hacked into Blomkvist’s computer to try to find out why Balder had summoned him to his home in the middle of the night. Getting access to his email had been easy enough. But that had now stopped. When was the last time it had been impossible for Bogdanov to read someone’s emails? Never, so far as Holtser was aware. Blomkvist had suddenly become much more careful — right after the woman and the boy disappeared from Sveavägen.

That in itself was no guarantee that the journalist knew where they now were. But as time went on there were more indications that the theory might be right, and in any case Kira did not seem to need cast-iron evidence. She wanted to go for Blomkvist. Or, if not him, then someone else at the magazine. More than anything she was obsessive in her determination to track down the woman and the child.

Maybe Holtser could not understand the subtleties of Kira’s motives. But it was for his benefit that they were going to do away with the boy. Kira chose to take significant risks for Holtser, and he was grateful, he really was, even though now in the car he felt uneasy.

He tried to draw strength from thinking about Olga. Whatever happened, she must not wake up and see a drawing of her father on all the front pages. He tried to reassure himself that the hardest part was behind them. Assuming Zander had given them the right location, the job should be straightforward. They were three heavily armed men, four if you counted Bogdanov, who spent most of the time staring at his computer as usual.

The team consisted of Holtser, Bogdanov, Orlov and Dennis Wilton, a gangster who had been a member of Svavelsjö M.C. but who now worked for Kira. Four men against one woman who was probably asleep, and was also protecting a child. It shouldn’t be a problem, not at all. But Kira was almost manic:

“Don’t underestimate Salander!”

She said it so many times that even Bogdanov, who always agreed with everything she said, began to get irritated. Of course Holtser had seen how fit and fast and fearless the woman had been on Sveavägen. But the way Kira described her, she must be some kind of superwoman. It was ridiculous. Holtser had never met a woman who could remotely be a match for him — or even for Orlov — in combat. Still, he promised to be careful. First he would go up and check out the terrain and prepare a strategy. They would not be drawn into a trap. He stressed this many times over, and when finally they arrived at an inlet next to a rocky slope and a jetty, he took command. He told the others to get ready in the shelter of the car while he went ahead to identify the house.

Holtser liked early mornings. He liked the silence and the feeling of transition in the air. Now he was leaning forward as he walked, and listening. It was reassuringly dark — no lights were on. He left the jetty behind him and came to a wooden fence with a rickety gate, right next to an overgrown prickly bush. He opened the gate and started to climb up the steep wooden steps holding the handrail on the right, and soon he was able to make out the house above.

It lay hidden behind pine trees and aspens and was only a dark outline, with a terrace on the south side. On the terrace were some glass doors which they would have no trouble breaking through. At first sight he saw no serious difficulty. He was moving almost soundlessly and for a moment he considered finishing off the job himself. Maybe it was even his moral responsibility, and it should be no more difficult than other jobs he had done. On the contrary.

There were no policemen this time, no guards, nor any sign of an alarm system. True, he did not have his assault rifle with him, but then there was no need for it. The rifle was excessive, the result of Kira’s heated imagination. He had his pistol, his Remington, and that was more than enough. Suddenly — without his usual careful planning — he started moving along the side of the house, up to the terrace and the glass doors.

Then he stiffened, without at first knowing why — it could have been a sound, a movement, a danger he had only half sensed. He looked up at the rectangular window above him, but from his position he could not see into it. He kept still, now less and less sure of himself. Could it be the wrong house?

He resolved to get closer and peer in, and then... he was transfixed in the darkness. He was being observed. Those eyes which once before had looked at him were now staring glassily in his direction. That was when he should have reacted. He should have sprinted around to the terrace, gone straight in and shot the boy. But again he hesitated. He could not bring himself to draw his weapon. Faced with that look, he was lost.

The boy let out a shrill scream which seemed to set the window vibrating, and only then did Holtser tear himself out of his paralysis and race up onto the terrace. Without a moment’s reflection he hurtled straight through the glass doors and fired with what he thought was great precision, but he never found out whether he hit his target.

An explosive shadow-like figure came at him with such speed that he hardly had time to brace himself. He knew that he fired another shot and that someone shot back. In the next instant he slammed onto the floor with his full weight, a young woman tumbling over him with a rage in her eyes that was beyond anything he had ever seen. He reacted instinctively and tried to shoot again. But the woman was like a wild animal. She threw her head back and... Crack!

When he came to he had a taste of blood in his mouth and his pullover was sticky and wet. He must have been hit. Just then the boy and the woman passed him, and he tried to grab hold of the boy’s leg. At least he thought he did. But suddenly he was gasping for breath.

He no longer understood what was going on. Except that he was beaten, but by whom? By a woman? That insight became a part of his pain as he lay on the floor amidst glass and his own blood, breathing heavily, his eyes shut. He hoped it would be over soon. When he opened his eyes again he was surprised to see the woman still there. Had she not just left? No, she was standing by the table, he could see her thin boyish legs. He tried his utmost to get up. He looked for his weapon, and at the same time heard voices through the broken window, and then he moved once more to attack the woman.

But before he could do anything the woman exploded into motion and stormed out. From the terrace she threw herself headlong into the trees. Shots resounded in the dark and he muttered to himself, “Kill the bastards.” But it was all he could do to get to his feet and he cast a dull glance at the table in front of him.

There was a mass of crayons and paper which he looked at without really taking it all in. Then it was as if a claw had taken hold of his heart. He saw an evil demon with a pale face raising his hand to kill. It took a second or so for him to realize that the demon was himself, and he shuddered.

Yet he could not take his eyes off the image. Only then did he notice something scribbled at the top:

Chapter 27

When Aram Barzani of the Rapid Response Unit made his way into Gabriella Grane’s house at 4.52 he saw a large man dressed in black spreadeagled on the floor next to the round table.

He approached cautiously. The house seemed to have been abandoned. But he was not taking any risks. There were recent reports of a fierce gunfight up at the house and he could hear the excited voices of his colleagues outside on the steep rock slope.

“Here!” they shouted. “Here!”

Barzani did not understand what was going on, and for a moment he hesitated. Should he go to them? He decided to see first what condition the man on the floor was in. There was broken glass and blood all around, and the table was strewn with torn-up pieces of paper and crushed crayons. The man on the ground was crossing himself feebly. He was mumbling something. Probably a prayer. It sounded Russian; Barzani caught the word “Olga”. He told the man that a medical team was on its way.

“They were sisters,” the man said in English.

But it sounded so confused that Barzani attached no importance to it. Instead he searched through the man’s clothes, made sure that he was unarmed, and thought he had probably been shot in the stomach. His pullover was soaked in blood, and he looked alarmingly pale. Barzani asked what had happened. He got no reply, not at first. Then the man gasped out another strange sentence.

“My soul was captured in a drawing,” he said, and seemed to be about to lose consciousness.

Aram stayed for a few minutes to watch him, but when he heard from the ambulance crew he left the man and went down to the rocky slope. He wanted to discover what his colleagues had been shouting about. The snow was still falling and it was icy underfoot. Down by the water voices could be heard and the sound of more cars arriving. It was still dark and hard to see and there were many uneven rocks and straggly pines. The landscape was dramatic and steep. It could not have been easy to fight in this terrain and Barzani was gripped with foreboding. He noticed that it had become strangely quiet.

But his colleagues were not far away behind an overgrown aspen. He felt afraid — unusual for him — when he saw them staring down at the ground. What had they seen? Was the autistic boy dead?

He walked over slowly, thinking about his own boys, six and nine now. They were crazy about football — did nothing else, talked about nothing else. Björn and Anders. He and Dilvan had given them Swedish names because they had thought it would make their lives easier. What kind of people come out here to kill a child? He was gripped by a sudden fury. But in the next moment he breathed a sigh of relief.

There was no boy there, but two men lying on the ground, apparently both shot in the stomach. One of them — a brutal-looking type with pockmarked skin and a stubby boxer’s nose — tried to get up, but was easily pushed down again. His face betrayed his humiliation and his right hand was shaking with pain or rage. The other man, who was wearing a leather jacket and had his hair in a ponytail, seemed in worse shape. He lay still and stared in shock at the dark sky.

“No sign of the child?” Barzani said.

“Nothing,” his colleague Klas Lang said.

“And the woman?”

“No sign.”

Barzani was not sure if this was good news and he asked a few more questions. But no-one knew what had happened. The only certainty was that two automatic weapons, Barrett REC7s, had been found thirty or forty metres away, close to the jetty. They were assumed to belong to the men, but when asked how they had ended up there, the man with the pockmarked face spat out an incomprehensible answer.

Barzani and his colleagues spent the next fifteen minutes combing the terrain. All they could find were further signs of combat. More and more people began to arrive on the scene: ambulance crew, Detective Sergeant Modig, two or three crime scene technicians, a succession of regular policemen and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who was accompanied by a massive American with a crew cut who immediately commanded everyone’s respect. At 5.25 they were informed that a witness was waiting to be interviewed down by the seashore and parking area. The man wanted to be addressed as K.G. He was actually called Karl-Gustav Matzon. He had fairly recently bought a new-build on the other side of the water. According to Lang, he needed to be taken with a pinch of salt: “The old boy has a very vivid imagination.”

Modig and Holmberg were standing in the parking area, trying to make sense of what had happened. The picture so far was fragmented and they were hoping that the witness K.G. Matzon would bring a measure of clarity to the night.

But when they saw him coming towards them along the shoreline, that seemed less and less likely. K.G. Matzon was resplendent in a Tyrolean hat, green checked trousers and a red Canada Goose jacket and he was sporting an absurd twirly moustache. He looked as if he were trying to be funny.

“K.G. Matzon?” Modig said.

“The very same,” he said, and without any prompting — maybe he realized that his credibility needed a boost — he explained that he ran True Crimes, a publishing house which produced books on notable crimes.

“Excellent. But right now we’d like a factual account — not some sales pitch for a forthcoming book,” Modig said, to be on the safe side. Matzon said that, of course, he understood.

He was after all a “respectable person”. He had woken up at a ridiculous hour, he said, and lain there listening to “the silence and the calm”. But just before 4.30 he heard something which he immediately recognized as a pistol shot, so he quickly got dressed and went onto his terrace — which had a view of the beach, the rock promontory and the parking area where they were now standing.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing. It was eerily quiet. Then the air exploded. It sounded as if a war had broken out.”

“You heard more shots?”

“There were cracks of gunfire from the promontory on the other side of the inlet and I stared across, stunned, and then... did I mention I was a birdwatcher?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, it’s made my eyesight very good, you see. I’ve got eagle eyes. I’m used to pinpointing tiny details far off, and I’m sure that’s why I noticed a small dot on the rock ledge up there, do you see it? The edge of it sort of cuts into the rock slope like a pocket.”

Modig looked up at the slope and nodded.

“At first I couldn’t tell what it was,” Matzon continued. “But then I realized it was a child — a boy, I think. He was sitting up there in a crouch and trembling, at least that’s how it seemed to me, and then suddenly... my God, I’ll never forget it.”

“What?”

“Someone came racing down from above, a woman, and she leaped into the air and landed so violently on the rock ledge that she all but fell off it, and after that they sat there together, she and the boy, and just waited, and waited for the inevitable, and then...”

“Yes?”

“Two men appeared holding assault rifles and shot and shot, and as I’m sure you can imagine, I just threw myself to the ground. I was scared I’d get hit. But I couldn’t help looking up at them all the same. You see, from where I was the boy and the girl were clearly visible. But they were invisible to the men standing at the top, at least for the moment. It was obvious to me that it was only a matter of time before they were discovered and there was no escape. As soon as they left the rock ledge the men would see them and kill them. It was a hopeless situation.”

“But we’ve found neither the boy nor the woman up there,” Modig said.

“That’s just it! The men got closer and closer — they only needed to lean forward to see the woman and the child. In the end they could probably have heard them breathing. But then...”

“Yes?’

“You’re not going to believe this. That man from the Rapid Response Unit definitely didn’t.”

“Well, go ahead and tell me, and we can worry later about whether it’s believable.”

“When the men stopped to listen, maybe they sensed they were very close, the woman leaped to her feet and shot them. Bang, bang! Then she rushed forward and threw their weapons away. It was like an action film, and after that she ran, or rather rolled, almost fell down the slope with the boy to a B.M.W. standing here in the parking area. Just before they got into the car I saw that the woman was holding something — it looked like a computer bag.”

“Did they drive away in the B.M.W.?”

“At a fearful speed. I have no idea where they went.”

“Of course not.”

“But that’s not all.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was another car there — a Range Rover, I think, black, a new model.”

“And what happened to that one?”

“I was busy ringing the emergency services, but just as I was about to hang up I saw two more people coming down from the wooden steps over there, a tall thin man and a woman. I didn’t get a good look at them from that distance. But I can still tell you two things about that woman.”

“Yes?”

“She was a twelve-pointer, and she was angry.”

“Twelve-pointer meaning beautiful?”

“Or at least glamorous, classy. You could see it a mile off. But boy was she furious. Just before they got into the Range Rover she slapped the man, and the weird thing is: he hardly reacted. He just nodded as if he thought he deserved it. Then he got behind the wheel and they were gone.”

Modig noted everything down, realizing that she had to get out a nationwide search bulletin for both the Range Rover and the B.M.W. without delay.

Gabriella Grane was drinking a cappuccino in her kitchen on Villagatan and thinking that she was holding it together, all things considered. But she was probably in shock.

Helena Kraft wanted to see her at 8.00 in the office at Säpo. Grane guessed that she wouldn’t just get the sack. There would be judicial consequences too, which would pretty much ruin her prospects of finding another job. At thirty-three, her career was over.

And that was by no means the worst of it. She had known that she was flouting the law and had taken a conscious risk. But she had done it because she believed it was the best way to protect Frans Balder’s son. Now, after the shoot-out at her summer place, no-one seemed to know where the boy was. He might be injured, or even dead. Grane was racked by the most devastating feelings of guilt: first the father and now the son.

She got up and looked at the clock. It was 7.15 and she needed to get going to give herself time to clean out her desk before the meeting with Kraft. She made up her mind to behave with dignity, to not make any excuses or beg to be allowed to stay. Her Blackphone rang, but she couldn’t be bothered to answer. Instead she put on her boots and her Prada coat and an extravagant red scarf. If she was going under, she might just as well go with a bit of panache. She stood in front of the hall mirror and touched up her make-up, wryly giving herself the victory sign, as Nixon had when he resigned. Then her Blackphone rang again and this time she answered reluctantly. It was Casales at the N.S.A.

“I’ve just heard,” she said.

Of course she had.

“How are you feeling?”

“What do you think?”

“Like the worst person in the whole world?”

“Pretty much.”

“Who’ll never get another job?”

“Spot on, Alona.”

“In that case, let me tell you, you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. You did the right thing.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“Doesn’t seem like the moment for jokes, sweetheart. You have a mole on your team.”

Gabriella took a deep breath. “Who is it?”

“Nielsen.”

Gabriella froze. “Do you have proof?”

“Oh yes, I’ll send it all over in a few minutes.”

“Why would Nielsen betray us?”

“I guess he didn’t see it as a betrayal.”

“What on earth did he see it as if not betrayal?”

“Collaborating with Big Brother maybe, doing his duty by the leading nation in the free world? What do I know?”

“So he gave you information.”

“He helped us to help ourselves, actually. He gave us information about your server and your encryption. It’s not as outrageous as it sounds. Let’s face it, we listen in on everything from the neighbours’ gossip to the prime minister’s telephone calls.”

“But this time the information was leaked a stage further.”

“In this case it seeped out like we were a funnel. I know, Gabriella, that you didn’t exactly stick to the rulebook. But I’m absolutely convinced that you were in the right, and I’ll make sure that your superiors get to hear it. You could see that there was something rotten in your organization, so you couldn’t act within it, yet you were determined not to shirk your responsibility.”

“But it went wrong.”

“Sometimes things go wrong, no matter how careful you are.”

“Thanks, Alona, it’s nice of you to say so. But if anything has happened to August Balder, I will never forgive myself.”

“Gabriella, the boy is O.K. He’s cruising around in a car somewhere with Miss Salander, in case someone’s still chasing them.”

Grane could not take it in. “What do you mean?”

“That he’s unhurt, babe, and that thanks to him his father’s murderer has been caught and identified.”

“You’re saying August is alive?”

“That’s right.”

“How do you know?”

“Let’s just say I have a very well-placed source.”

“Alona...”

“Yes?”

“If what you say is true, you’ve given me back my life.”

After hanging up, Grane rang Kraft and insisted that Mårten Nielsen be present at their meeting. Reluctantly, Kraft agreed.

It was 7.30 in the morning when Needham and Blomkvist made their way down the steps from Grane’s summer house to the Audi in the parking area by the beach. Snow lay over the landscape and neither of them said a word. At 5.30 Blomkvist had got a text message from Salander, as brisk and to the point as ever.

Again Salander had not mentioned her own state of health. But it was an incredible relief to hear about the boy. Afterwards Blomkvist had been questioned at length by Modig and Holmberg and he told them every detail of what he and the magazine had been doing over the past few days. They were not friendly or well disposed towards him, yet he got the feeling that somehow they understood. Now, an hour later, he was walking past the jetty. Up the slope a deer scampered into the forest. Blomkvist settled into the driving seat and waited for Needham, who came loping along in his wake. The American’s back was giving him trouble.

On the way to Brunn they found themselves in traffic. For several minutes nothing moved and Blomkvist thought of Zander, who was constantly on his mind. They had still not had any sign of life from him.

“Can you get something noisy on the radio?” Needham said.

Blomkvist tuned into 107.1 and got James Brown belting out what a sex machine he was.

“Give me your phones,” Needham said.

He stacked them next to the speakers at the back of the car. He clearly meant to talk about something sensitive, and Blomkvist had nothing against that — he had to write his story and needed all the facts he could get. But he also knew better than most that there’s no such thing as a leak without an agenda. Although Blomkvist felt a certain affinity with Needham and even appreciated his grumpy charm, he did not trust him for one second.

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

“You could put it this way,” Needham began. “We know that in business and industry there’s always someone taking advantage of inside information.”

“Agreed.”

“For a while we were pretty much spared that in the world of intelligence, for the simple reason that we guarded different kinds of secrets. The dynamite was elsewhere. But since the end of the Cold War, all that has changed. Surveillance in general has become more widespread. These days we control huge amounts of valuable material.”

“And there are people taking advantage of this, you say.”

“Well, that’s basically the whole point of it. Corporate espionage helps keep companies informed about the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. It’s a grey area. Something that was seen as criminal or unethical decades ago is now standard operating procedure. We haven’t been much better at the N.S.A., in fact maybe we’re even...”

“The worst?”

“Just take it easy, let me finish,” Needham said. “I’d say we have a certain moral code. But we’re a large organization with tens of thousands of employees and inevitably there are rotten apples — even one or two very highly placed rotten apples I was thinking of handing you.”

“Out of the kindness of your heart, of course,” Blomkvist said with a touch of sarcasm.

“O.K., maybe not entirely. But listen. When senior management at our place crosses the line and gets into criminal activities, what do you think happens?”

“Nothing very nice.”

“As you know, there’s a corrupt unit at Solifon, headed up by a man called Zigmund Eckerwald, whose job it is to find out what the competing tech companies are up to. They not only steal the technology but also sell what they steal. That’s bad for Solifon and maybe even for the whole Nasdaq.”

“And for you too.”

“That’s right. It turns out that our two most senior executives in industrial espionage — their names are Jacob Barclay and Brian Abbot — get help from Eckerwald and his gang. In exchange the N.S.A. helps Eckerwald with large-scale communications monitoring. Solifon identifies where the big innovations are happening, and our idiots pluck out the drawings and the technical details.”

“I assume the money this brings in doesn’t always end up in the state coffers.”

“It’s worse than that, buddy. If you do this sort of thing as a state employee, you make yourself very vulnerable, especially because Eckerwald and his gang are also helping major criminals. To be fair, at first they probably didn’t know their clients were major criminals.”

“But that’s what they were?”

“Damn right. And they took advantage too. I could only dream of recruiting hackers at their level of expertise, and the very essence of their business is to exploit information, so you can imagine: once they realized what our guys at the N.S.A. were up to, they knew they were sitting on a goldmine.”

“So they were in a position to blackmail.”

“Talk about having the upper hand. Our guys haven’t just been stealing from large corporations. They’ve also plundered small family businesses and solo entrepreneurs who are struggling to survive. It wouldn’t look too good if everything came out. So as a result the N.S.A. is forced to help not just Eckerwald and Solifon, but also the criminals.”

“You mean the Spiders?”

“You got it. Maybe for a while everyone stays happy. It’s big business and the money’s rolling in. But then a little genius pops up in the middle of the action, a certain Professor Balder, and he’s just as good at ferreting around as he is at doing everything else. So he finds out about this scheme, or at least part of it. Then of course everyone’s scared shitless and decides that something has to be done. I’m not entirely clear on how these decisions got made. I’m guessing our guys hoped legal threats would be enough. But when you’re in bed with a bunch of criminals... The Spiders prefer violence, so they draw our guys into the plan at a late stage, just to bind them in even more tightly.”

“Jesus.”

“I would never have gotten to know any of this if we hadn’t been hacked,” Needham said.

“Another reason to leave the hacker in peace.”

“Which is exactly what I’m going to do, so long as she tells me how she did it.”

“I don’t know how much your promises are worth, but there’s another thing I’ve been wondering about,” Blomkvist said.

“Shoot.”

“You mentioned two guys, Barclay and Abbot. Are you sure it stops with them? Who’s their boss?”

“I can’t give you his name unfortunately. It’s classified.”

“I suppose I’ll have to live with that.”

“You will,” Needham said inflexibly. At that moment Blomkvist noticed that traffic was starting to flow again.

Chapter 28

Professor Edelman was standing in the car park at the Karolinska Institute wondering what in heaven’s name he had let himself in for. He was embarking on an arrangement which would mean his having to cancel a whole series of meetings, lectures and conferences.

Even so he felt strangely elated. He had been entranced not just by the boy but also by the young woman who looked as if she had come straight from a street brawl, but who drove a brand new B.M.W. and spoke with chilling authority. He had barely been aware of what he was doing when he said, “Yes, sure, why not?” to her questions, although it was obviously both foolish and rash. The only grain of independence he had shown was to have declined all offers of compensation.

He was going to pay his own travel and hotel expenses, he said. He must have felt guilty. But he was moved to take the boy under his wing, his scientific curiosity was piqued. A savant who both drew with photographic exactitude and could perform prime-number factorization — how absolutely riveting. To his own surprise he even decided to skip the Nobel Prize dinner. The young woman had made him take leave altogether of his senses.

Hanna Balder was sitting in the kitchen on Torsgatan, smoking. It felt as if she had done little else apart from sit there and puff away with a heavy feeling in her stomach. She had been given an unusual amount of support, but she had also been getting an unusual amount of physical abuse. Lasse Westman could not handle her anxiety. It detracted from his own martyrdom.

He was always flying into a rage and yelling, “Can’t you even keep track of your own brat?” Often he lashed out with his fists or threw her across the apartment like a rag doll. Now he would probably go crazy too — she had spilled coffee all over the Dagens Nyheter culture section, and Lasse was already worked up because of a theatre review in it which he had found too sympathetic to actors he did not like.

“What the hell have you done?”

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I’ll wipe it up.”

She could tell from the set of his mouth that that would not satisfy him, he would hit her before he even knew it himself, and she was so well prepared for his slap that she did not say one word or even move her head. She could feel the tears welling up and her heart pounding. But actually that had nothing to do with the blow. That morning she had received a call which was so perplexing that she hardly understood it: August had been found, had disappeared again and was “probably” unharmed — “probably”. It was impossible for Hanna to know if she should be more worried, or less.

The hours had gone by with no further news. Suddenly she got to her feet, no longer caring whether she would get another beating or not. She went into the living room and heard Lasse panting behind her. August’s drawing paper was still lying on the floor and an ambulance was wailing outside. She heard footsteps in the stairwell. Was someone on their way here? The doorbell rang.

“Don’t open. It’ll be some bloody journalist,” Lasse snapped.

Hanna did not want to open either. Still, she could not very well ignore it, could she? Perhaps the police wanted to interview her again, or maybe, maybe they had more information now, good news or bad news.

As she went to the door she thought of Frans. She remembered how he had stood there saying that he had come for August. She remembered his eyes and the fact that he had shaved off his beard, and her own longing for her old life, before Lasse Westman — a time when the telephone rang and the job offers came flooding in, and fear had not yet set its claws into her. She opened the door with the safety chain on and at first she saw nothing; just the lift door, and the reddish-brown walls. Then a shock ran through her, and for a moment she could not believe it. But it really was August! His hair was a tangled mess and his clothes were filthy. He was wearing a pair of trainers much too big for him, and yet: he looked at her with the same serious, impenetrable expression as ever. She would not have expected him to turn up on his own, but when she undid the safety chain she still gave a start. Next to August stood a cool young woman in a leather jacket, with scratch marks on her face and earth in her hair, glaring down at the floor. She had a large suitcase in her hand.

“I’ve come to give you back your son,” she said without looking up.

“Oh my God,” Hanna said. “My God!”

That was all she managed to say, and for a few seconds she was completely at a loss as she stood there in the doorway. Then her shoulders began to shake. She sank to her knees and, forgetting the fact that August hated to be hugged, she threw her arms around him murmuring, “My boy, my boy...” until the tears came. The odd thing was: August not only let her do it, he also seemed on the verge of saying something — as if he had learned to talk on top of everything. But before he had the chance, Lasse was standing behind her.

“What the hell... Well, look who’s here!” he growled, as if he wanted to carry on with their fight.

But then he got a grip on himself. It was an impressive piece of acting, in a way. In the space of a second he began to radiate the presence which used to make women swoon.

“And we get the kid delivered to our front doorstep,” he said to the woman on the landing. “How convenient. Is he O.K.?”

“He’s O.K.,” the woman said in a strange monotone, and without asking walked into the apartment with the suitcase and her muddy boots.

“By all means, just come right on in,” Lasse said in an acid tone.

“I’m here to help you pack, Lasse.”

This was such a strange reply that Hanna was convinced she had misheard, and Lasse did not seem to understand either. He just stood there looking stupid, his mouth wide open.

“What did you say?”

“You’re moving out.”

“Is this some kind of joke?”

“Not at all. You’re leaving this house now, right now, and you’re not coming anywhere near August ever again. You’ve seen him for the last time.”

“You must be off your rocker!”

“Actually I’m being unusually generous. I was planning on throwing you down the stairs there. But I brought a suitcase with me. Thought I’d let you pack some shirts and pants.”

“What kind of a freak are you?” Lasse shouted, both bewildered and beside himself with rage, and he bore down on the woman with the full weight of his hostility, and Hanna wondered if he was going to take a swipe at her as well.

But something stopped him. Maybe it was the woman’s eyes, or possibly the mere fact that she did not react like anyone else would have done. Instead of backing off or looking frightened she only smiled at him, and took a few crumpled pieces of paper from an inside pocket and handed them to Lasse.

“If ever you and your friend Roger should find yourselves missing August, you can always look at this and remember,” she said.

Lasse turned over the papers, confused. Then he screwed up his face in horror and Hanna took a quick look herself. They were drawings and the top one was of... Lasse. Lasse swinging his fists and looking profoundly evil. Later she would hardly be able to explain it. It was not just that she understood what had been going on when August had been alone at home with Lasse and Roger. She also saw her own life more clearly and soberly than she had for years.

Lasse had looked at her with exactly that twisted, livid face hundreds of times, most recently a minute ago. She knew this was something no-one should have to endure, neither she nor August, and she shrank back. At least she thought she did, because the woman looked at her with a new focus. Hanna eyed her uneasily. They seemed on some level to understand each other.

“Am I right, Hanna, he’s got to go?” the woman said.

The question was potentially lethal, and Hanna looked down at August’s oversize shoes.

“What are those shoes he’s wearing?”

“Mine.”

“Why?”

“We left in a hurry this morning.”

“And what have you been doing?”

“Hiding.”

“I don’t understand...” she began, but got no further.

Lasse grabbed hold of her violently. “Why don’t you tell this psychopath that the only one who’s leaving is her?” he roared.

Hanna cowered, but then... It may have been something to do with the expression on Lasse’s face, or the sense of something implacable in the young woman’s bearing. But then... Hanna heard herself say, “You’re leaving, Lasse! And don’t ever come back!”

It was as if someone else were speaking in her place. And after that things moved quickly. Lasse raised his hand to strike her, but no blow came, not from him. The young woman reacted with lightning speed, and hit him in the face two, three times like a trained boxer, felling him with a kick to the leg.

“What the hell!” was all he was able to say.

He crashed to the floor, and the young woman stood over him. As Hanna took August into his bedroom she realized for how long and how desperately she had wished Lasse Westman out of her life.

Bublanski longed to see Rabbi Goldman.

He also longed for some of Modig’s orange chocolate, for his new Dux bed and for springtime. But right now it was his job to get some order into this investigation. It was true that, on one level, he was satisfied. August Balder was said to be unharmed and on his way home to his mother.

Thanks to the boy himself and to Lisbeth Salander his father’s killer had been arrested, even though it was not yet established that he would survive his injuries. He was in intensive care at Danderyd hospital. He was called Boris Latvinov but had for some time been using the name Jan Holtser. He was a major and former elite soldier from the Soviet army, and his name had cropped up in the past in several murder investigations, but he had never been convicted. He had his own business in the security industry, and was both a Finnish and Russian citizen, and a resident of Helsinki; no doubt someone had doctored his government records.

The other two people who had been found at the summer house on Ingarö had been identified by their fingerprints; Dennis Wilton, an old gangster from Svavelsjö M.C. who had done time for both aggravated robbery and grievous bodily harm; and Vladimir Orlov, a Russian with a criminal record in Germany for procuring, whose two wives had died in unexplained circumstances. None of the men had yet said a word about what happened, or about anything at all. Nor did Bublanski hold out much hope that this would change. Men like that tend to hold their peace in police interviews. But then those were the rules of the game.

What Bublanski was unhappy about, though, was the feeling that these three men were no more than foot soldiers and that there was a leadership above them linked to the upper echelons of society in both Russia and in the U.S.A. He had no problem with a journalist knowing more about his investigation than he did. In that respect he was not proud. He just wanted to move ahead, and was grateful for all information, whatever its source. But Blomkvist’s discerning approach to the case had pointed up their own shortcomings and reminded Bublanski of the leak in the investigation and the dangers to which the boy had been exposed because of them. On this score his anger would never subside, and perhaps that explains why he was so irritated at the head of Säpo’s eager efforts to get hold of him — and Kraft was not the only one. The I.T. people at the National Criminal Police were after him too, and so were Chief Prosecutor Richard Ekström and a Stanford professor by the name of Steven Warburton from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute who wanted to talk about “a significant risk”, as Amanda Flod put it.

That bothered Bublanski, along with a thousand other things. And there was someone knocking at his door. It was Modig, who looked tired and was wearing no make-up, revealing something different about her face.

“All three prisoners are having surgery,” she said. “It’ll be a while before we can question them again.”

“Try to question them, you mean.”

“I did manage to have a brief word with Latvinov. He was conscious for a while before his operation.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Just that he wanted to talk to a priest.”

“How come all lunatics and murderers are religious these days?”

“While all sensible old chief inspectors doubt the existence of their God, you mean?”

“Now, now.”

“Latvinov also seemed dejected, and that’s a good sign, I think,” Modig said. “When I showed him the drawing he just waved it away with a resigned expression.”

“So he didn’t try to claim it was a fabrication?”

“He just closed his eyes and started to talk about his priest.”

“Have you discovered what this American professor wants, the one who keeps calling?”

“What...? No... he’ll talk only to you. I think it’s about Balder’s research.”

“And Zander, the young journalist?”

“That’s what I came to talk about. It doesn’t look good.”

“What do we know?”

“That he worked late and was spotted disappearing down past Katarinahissen accompanied by a beautiful woman with strawberry- or dark-blonde hair and expensive clothes.”

“I’d not heard that.”

“They were seen by a man called Ken Eklund, a baker at Skansen. He lives in the Millennium building. He said they looked as if they were in love, or at least Zander did.”

“You think it could have been some sort of honeytrap?”

“It’s possible.”

“And this woman, might she be the same one who was seen at Ingarö?”

“We’re looking into that. But I don’t like the idea that they seemed to be heading towards Gamla Stan. Not only because we picked up Zander’s mobile phone signals there. That revolting specimen Orlov, who just spits at me whenever I try to question him, has an apartment on Mårten Trotzigs gränd.”

“Have we been there?”

“Not yet. We’ve only just discovered the address. The apartment was registered in the name of one of his companies.”

“Let’s hope there’s nothing unpleasant waiting for us there.”

Westman was lying on the floor in the entrance hall on Torsgatan, wondering how he could be so terrified. She was just a chick, a pierced punk chick who hardly came up to his chest. He should be able to throw her out like some little rat. Yet he was as if paralysed and it had nothing to do with the way the girl fought, he thought, still less with the fact that her foot was planted on his stomach. It was something about her look or her whole being that he could not put his finger on. For a few minutes he lay there like an idiot and listened.

“I’m just reminded,” she said, “that there’s something really wrong in my family. We seem to be capable of pretty much anything. Of the most unimaginable cruelties. It may be a genetic defect. Personally I’ve got this thing against men who harm children and women, and that makes me dangerous. When I saw August’s drawings of you and your friend Roger, I wanted to hurt you, badly. But I think August has been through enough, so there’s a slight chance that you and your friend might get off more lightly.”

“I’m—” Westman began.

“Quiet,” she said. “This isn’t a negotiation; it’s not even a conversation. I’m just setting out the terms, that’s all. Legally there are no problems. Frans was wise enough to register the apartment in August’s name. But for the rest, this is how it’s going to be: you have precisely four minutes to pack your things and get out. If you or Roger ever come back here or contact August in any way, I’ll make you suffer so much that you’ll be incapable of doing anything nice again, for the rest of your lives. In the meantime, I’ll be preparing to report you to the police with full details of the abuse you’ve subjected August to. As you know, we have more than the drawings to go on. We have testimonies from psychologists and experts. I’ll also be contacting the evening papers to tell them that I have material which substantiates the image of you that emerged in connection with your assault on Renata Kapusinski. Remind me, Lasse, what was it that you did? Bite her cheek through and kick her in the head?”

“So you’re going to go to the press.”

“I’m going to go to the press. I’m going to cause you and your friend every conceivable disgrace. But maybe — I’m saying maybe — you can hope to escape the worst of the humiliation so long as you’re never again seen near Hanna and August, and if you never again harm a woman. As a matter of fact I couldn’t give a shit about you. Once you leave, and if you live like a shy and timid little monk, you may be alright. I have my doubts — as we all know, the rate of re-offending for violence against women is high, and basically you’re a bastard, but with a bit of luck, who knows...? Have you got it?”

“I’ve got it,” he said, hating himself for saying so.

He saw no way out, he could only agree and do as he was told, and so he got up and went into the bedroom and swiftly packed some clothes. Then he took his coat and his mobile and left. He had nowhere to go.

He had never felt more pathetic in his life. Outside an unpleasant sleety rain lashed into him.

Salander heard the front door slam and footsteps receding down the stone stairs. She looked at August. He was standing still with his arms straight down by his sides, staring at her intently. That troubled her. A moment ago she had been in control of things, but now she was uncertain, and what on earth was the matter with Hanna Balder?

Hanna seemed about to burst into tears, and August... on top of everything else he started shaking his head and muttering. Salander just wanted to get out of there, but she stayed. Her work was not yet complete. Out of her pocket she took two plane tickets, a hotel voucher and a thick bundle of notes, both kronor and euros.

“I’d just like, from the bottom of my heart—” Hanna began.

“Quiet,” Salander cut in. “Here are some plane tickets to Munich. Departure is at 7.15 this evening so you’ve got to hurry. I’ve organized transport to take you directly to Schloss Elmau. It’s a nice hotel not far from Garmisch-Partenkirchen. You’ll be staying in a large room on the top floor, in the name of Müller, and you’ll be there for three months to start with. I’ve been in touch with Professor Edelman and explained to him the importance of absolute confidentiality. He’ll be making regular visits and seeing to it that August gets good care. Edelman will also arrange for suitable schooling.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m deadly serious. The police now have August’s drawing and the murderer has been arrested. But the people behind all this are still at large, and it’s impossible to know what they might be planning. You have to leave this apartment at once. I’m busy with a few other things, but I’ve arranged for a driver to take you to Arlanda. He’s a bit weird-looking, maybe, but he’s O.K. You can call him Plague. Have you got all that?”

“Yes, but—”

“Forget the buts. Just listen: you mustn’t use your credit card or your own mobile during the whole of your time away, Hanna. I’ve fixed an encrypted mobile for you, a Blackphone, in case there’s an emergency. My number is already programmed in. I’ll pick up all the costs of the hotel. You’ll get a hundred thousand kronor in cash, for unforeseen expenses. Any questions?”

“It sounds crazy.”

“Not to me.”

“But how can you afford all this?”

“I can afford it.”

“How can we...?” Hanna looked completely bewildered, as if she were not sure what to believe. Then she began to cry.

“How can we ever thank you?” she struggled to say.

“Thank?”

Salander repeated the word as if it were something incomprehensible. When Hanna came towards her with outstretched arms she backed away, and with her eyes fixed on the hallway floor she said:

“Pull yourself together! Get a grip on yourself and stop taking whatever it is you’re on, pills or anything else. That’s how you can thank me.”

“I will...”

“And if anyone gets it into their head that August needs to be put in some home or institution, I want you to fight back as hard and as ruthlessly as you can. Aim for their weakest point. Be a warrior.”

“A warrior?”

“Exactly. Don’t let anyone...”

Salander stopped herself. They were not perhaps the greatest words of farewell, but they would have to do. She turned and walked towards the front door. She did not get far. August started to mutter again, and this time they could make out what the boy was saying.

“Not go, not go...”

Salander had no good answer to that either. She just said, “You’ll be O.K.” and then added, as if talking to herself, “Thanks for the scream this morning.” There was silence for a moment, and Salander wondered if she should say more. But instead she turned and slipped out of the door.

Hanna called after her, “I can’t tell you what this means to me!”

But Salander heard nothing. She was already running down the steps to her car. When she reached Västerbron, Blomkvist called on the Redphone app to say that the N.S.A. had tracked her down.

”Tell them hi and that I’m on their tracks too,” she said.

Then she drove to Roger Winter’s house and scared him half to death. After that she drove back to her place and set to work with the encrypted N.S.A. file, without coming any closer to a solution.

Needham and Blomkvist had worked a long day in the hotel room at the Grand. Needham had a fantastic story for Blomkvist, who would be able to write the scoop Millennium so badly needed, but his feeling of unease did not abate. It was not just because Zander was still missing. There was something about Needham that did not add up. Why had he turned up in the first place, and why was he putting so much energy into helping out a small Swedish magazine, far from all the centres of power in the U.S.? Blomkvist had undertaken not to disclose the hacker breach, and had half promised to try to persuade Salander to talk to Needham. But that hardly seemed enough.

Needham behaved as if he was taking enormous risks. The curtains were drawn and their mobiles were lying at a safe distance. There was a feeling of paranoia in the room. Confidential documents were laid out on the bed. Blomkvist was permitted to read them, but not to quote from or copy them. And every now and then Needham interrupted his account to discuss various aspects of the right to protect journalistic sources. He was obsessively thorough about ensuring that the leak could not be traced back to him, and sometimes he listened nervously for footsteps in the corridor or looked out through a gap in the curtains to check that no-one was out there watching the hotel, and yet... Blomkvist could not help feeling that most of it was play-acting.

He became more and more convinced that Needham knew exactly what he was doing and was not even especially worried about someone listening in. It occurred to Blomkvist that Needham was playing a part which had the backing of his superiors — maybe he himself had also been given a role in this play which he did not yet understand.

Therefore he paid close attention not just to what Needham said, but also to what he did not, and he considered what he might be trying to achieve by going public. There was undoubtedly a certain amount of anger there. Some “bastards” in a department called Protection of Strategic Technologies had prevented Needham from nailing the hacker who had got into his system, just because they didn’t want to be exposed with their pants round their ankles, and that infuriated him, he said. Blomkvist had no reason not to believe him, still less to doubt that Needham genuinely did want to exterminate these people, to “crush them, grind them to pulp under my boots”.

There were other aspects of the story he was not quite so comfortable with. Occasionally it felt as if Needham was wrestling with some kind of self-censorship. From time to time Blomkvist went down to the lobby just to think, or to call Berger or Salander. Berger always answered on the first ring and, even though they were both enthusiastic about the story, Zander’s disappearance haunted their conversations.

Salander did not pick up all day, until eventually he got hold of her at 5.20. She sounded distracted, and informed him that the boy was now safe with his mother.

“And how are you?” he said.

“O.K.”

“Not hurt?”

“Nothing new at least.”

Blomkvist took a deep breath. “Have you hacked into the N.S.A.’s intranet, Lisbeth?”

“Have you been talking to Ed the Ned?”

“No comment.”

He would say nothing, even to Salander. The protection of sources was even more important to him than loyalty to her.

“Ed isn’t so dumb after all,” she said.

“So you have.”

“Possibly.”

Blomkvist felt the urge to ask her what the hell she thought she was doing. Instead, as calmly as he could, he said:

“They’re prepared to let you off if you’ll agree to meet them and tell them how you did it.”

“Tell them from me that I’m on to them as well.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That I’ve got more than they think.”

“O.K. But would you consider meeting...”

“Ed?”

How the hell did she know, Blomkvist thought. Needham had wanted to be the one to reveal himself to her.

“Ed,” he said.

“A cocky bugger.”

“Pretty cocky. But would you consider meeting him if we provide guarantees that you won’t be arrested?”

“There are no such guarantees.”

“I could get in touch with my sister Annika and ask her to represent you.”

“I’ve got better things to do,” she said, as if she did not want to talk about it any more. He could not stop himself from saying, “This story we’re working on... I’m not sure I understand all of it.”

“What’s the difficulty?” Salander said.

“First of all, I don’t understand why Camilla has surfaced after all these years.”

“I suppose she has just been biding her time.”

“How do you mean?”

“She probably always knew she would be back to get her revenge for what I did to her and Zala. But she wanted to wait until she had built up her strength on every level. Nothing is more important to Camilla than to be strong, and I suppose she suddenly saw an opportunity, a chance to kill two birds with one stone. At least that’s my guess. Why don’t you ask her next time you have a drink together?”

“Have you spoken to Holger?”

“I’ve been busy.”

“And yet she failed. You got away, thank God.”

“I made it.”

“But aren’t you worried that she could be back at any moment?”

“It has occurred to me.”

“O.K., good. And you do know that Camilla and I did nothing more than walk a short way down Hornsgatan?”

Salander did not answer.

“I know you, Mikael,” was all she said. “And now that you’ve met Ed, I guess I’ll have to protect myself from him too.”

Blomkvist smiled to himself.

“Yes,” he said. “You’re probably right. Let’s not trust him any more than we absolutely have to. I don’t want to become his useful idiot.”

“Doesn’t sound like a role for you, Mikael.”

“No, and that’s why I’d love to know what you discovered when you accessed their intranet.”

“A whole load of compromising shit.”

“About Eckerwald and the Spiders’ relationship with the N.S.A.?”

“That and a bit more besides.”

“Which you were planning to tell me about.”

“I might do, if you behave yourself,” she said with a teasing tone, and that only made him feel happy.

Then he chuckled, because at that moment he realized precisely what Ed Needham was trying to do.

It hit him so forcefully that he had a hard time keeping up his act when he returned to the hotel room, and he went on working with the American until 10.00 that night.

Chapter 29

Vladimir Orlov’s apartment on Mårten Trotzigs gränd was neat and tidy. The bed was made and the sheets were clean. The laundry basket in the bathroom was empty. Yet there were signs that something was not quite right. Neighbours reported that some removal men had been there, and a close inspection revealed bloodstains on the floor and on the wall above the headboard. The blood was compared to traces of saliva in Zander’s apartment and a match confirmed.

But the men now in custody — the two who were still capable of communicating — claimed to have no knowledge of bloodstains or of Zander, so Bublanski and his team concentrated on getting more information on the woman who had been seen with him. By now the media had published columns and columns not only about the drama on Ingarö but also about Andrei Zander’s disappearance. Both evening newspapers and Svenska Morgon-Posten and Metro had carried prominent photographs of the journalist, and there was already speculation that he might have been murdered. Usually that would jog people’s memories and prompt them to remember anything suspicious, but now it was almost the exact opposite.

Such witness accounts as came in and were thought to be credible were peculiarly vague, and everyone who came forward — except for Mikael Blomkvist and the baker from Skansen — took it upon themselves to remark that they did not suppose the woman guilty of any crime. She had apparently made an overwhelmingly good impression on everyone who had encountered her. A bartender called Sören Karlsten, who had served the woman and Zander in Papagallo on Götgatan, even went on and on boasting that he was such a good judge of character and claimed to be absolutely certain that this woman “would never hurt a soul”.

“She was class personified.”

She was just about everything personified, if one were to believe the witnesses, and from what Bublanski could see it would be virtually impossible to produce an identikit picture of her. The witness accounts all depicted her in different terms, as if they were projecting their image of an ideal woman onto her, and so far they had no photographs from any surveillance camera. It was almost laughable. Blomkvist said that the woman was without a shadow of doubt Camilla Salander, twin sister of Lisbeth. But go back in the records for many years and there was no trace of her. It was as if she had ceased to exist. If Camilla Salander were still alive, then it was under a new identity.

Bublanski especially did not like it that there had been two unexplained deaths in the foster family she had left behind. The police investigations at the time were deficient, full of loose threads and question marks which had never been followed up.

Bublanski had read the reports, ashamed that out of some bizarre respect for the family’s tragedy his colleagues had even failed to get to the bottom of the glaring problem that both the father and the daughter had emptied their bank accounts just before their deaths, or that in the very week that he had been found hanged the father had started a letter to her which began:

“Camilla, why is it so important to you to destroy my life?”

This person who seemed to have enchanted all the witnesses was shrouded in ominous darkness.

It was now 8.00 in the morning and there were a hundred other things Bublanski should have been attending to, so he reacted with both irritation and guilt when he heard that he had a visitor. She was a woman who had been interviewed by Modig but who now insisted on meeting him. Afterwards he wondered if he had been especially receptive just then, maybe because all he was expecting was further problems. The woman in the doorway had a regal bearing but was not tall. She had dark, intense eyes which gave her a slightly melancholy look. She was dressed in a grey coat and a red dress that looked a bit like a sari.

“My name is Farah Sharif,” she said. “I’m a professor of computer sciences, and I was a close friend of Frans Balder.”

“Yes, of course,” Bublanski said, suddenly embarrassed. “Take a seat, please. My apologies for the mess.”

“I’ve seen much worse.”

“Is that so? Well. To what do I owe this honour?”

“I was far too naive when I spoke to your colleague.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because I have more information now. I’ve had a long conversation with Professor Warburton.”

“That’s right. He’s been looking for me too. But it’s been so chaotic I haven’t had time to call him back.”

“Steven is a professor of cybernetics at Stanford and a leading researcher in the field of technological singularity. These days he works at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose aim is to ensure that Artificial Intelligence is a positive help to mankind rather than the opposite.”

“Well, that sounds good,” Bublanski said. He felt uncomfortable whenever this topic came up.

“Steven lives somewhat in a world of his own. He found out what happened to Frans only yesterday, and that’s why he didn’t call sooner. But he told me that he had spoken to Frans as recently as Monday.”

“What did they talk about?”

“His research. You know, Frans had been so secretive ever since he went off to the States. I was close to him, but not even I knew anything about what he was doing. I was arrogant enough to think I understood some of it at least, but now it turns out I was wrong.”

“In what way?”

“Frans had not only taken his old A.I. program a step further, he had also developed fresh algorithms and new topographical material for quantum computers.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Quantum computers are computers based on quantum mechanics. They are many thousand times faster in certain areas than conventional computers. The great advantage with quantum computers is that the fundamental constituent quantum bits — qubits — can superposition themselves.”

“You’ll have to take me slowly through that.”

“Not only can they take the binary positions one or zero as do traditional computers, they can also be both zero and one at the same time. At present quantum computers are much too specialized and cumbersome. But Frans — how can I best explain this to you? — would appear to have found ways to make them easier, more flexible and self-learning. He was onto something great — at least potentially. But as well as feeling pride in his breakthrough, he was also very worried — and that was obviously the reason he called Steven Warburton.”

“Why was he worried?”

“In the long term, because he suspected his creation could become a threat to the world, I imagine. But more immediately, because he knew things about the N.S.A.”

“What sort of things?”

“There’s one aspect I know nothing about. He had somehow stumbled upon the messier side of their industrial espionage. But there’s another aspect I do have a lot of information on. It’s no secret that the organization is working hard specifically to develop quantum computers. For the N.S.A. that would be paradise, pure and simple. An effective quantum machine would enable them to crack all encryptions, all digital security systems eventually, and after that no-one would be safe from that organization’s watchful eye.”

“A hideous thought,” Bublanski said with surprising feeling.

“But there is actually an even more frightening scenario: were such a thing to fall into the hands of major criminals,” Farah Sharif said.

“I see what you’re getting at.”

“So of course I’m keen to know what you’ve managed to get hold of from the men now under arrest.”

“Unfortunately nothing like that,” he said. “But these men are not exactly outstanding intellects. I doubt they would even pass secondary-school maths.”

“So the real computer genius got away?”

“I’m afraid so. He and a female suspect have disappeared without trace. They probably have a number of identities.”

“Worrying.”

Bublanski nodded and gazed into Farah Sharif’s dark eyes, which looked beseechingly at him. A hopeful thought stopped him from sinking back into despair.

“I’m not sure what it means,” he said.

“What?”

“We’ve had I.T. guys go through Balder’s computers. Given how security-conscious he was, it wasn’t easy. You can imagine. But we managed. We had a spot of luck, you might say, and what we soon realized was that one computer must have been stolen.

“I suspected as much,” she said. “Damn it!”

“But wait, I haven’t finished. We also understood that a number of machines had been connected to each other, and that occasionally these had been connected to a supercomputer in Tokyo.”

“That sounds feasible.”

“We can confirm that a large file, or at least something big, had recently been deleted, and we haven’t been able to restore it.”

“Are you suggesting Frans might have destroyed his own research?”

“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions. But it occurred to me while you were telling me all this.”

“Don’t you think the murderer might have deleted it?”

“You mean that he first copied it, and then removed it from his computers?”

“Yes.”

“I find that hard to believe. The man was only in the house for a very short while, he would never have had time — let alone the ability — to do anything like that.”

“O.K., that sounds reassuring, despite everything,” Sharif said doubtfully. “It’s just that...”

Bublanski waited.

“I don’t think it fits with Frans’ character. Would he really destroy the greatest thing he’d ever done? That would be like... I don’t know... chopping off his own arm, or even worse: killing a friend, destroying a life.”

“Sometimes one has to make a big sacrifice,” Bublanski said thoughtfully. “Destroy what one loves.”

“Or else there’s a copy somewhere.”

“Or else there’s a copy somewhere,” he repeated. Suddenly he did something strange: he reached out his hand.

Farah Sharif did not understand. She looked at the hand as if she were expecting him to give her something. But Bublanski decided not to let himself be discouraged.

“Do you know what my rabbi says? That the mark of a man is his contradictions. We can long to be away and at home, both at the same time. I never knew Professor Balder, and he might have thought that I was just an old fool. But I do know one thing: we can both love and fear our work, just as Balder seems to have both loved and run away from his son. To be alive, Professor Sharif, means not being completely consistent. It means venturing out in many directions all at the same time, and I wonder if your friend didn’t find himself in the throes of some sort of upheaval. Maybe he really did destroy his life’s work. Maybe he revealed himself with all his inherent contradictions towards the end, and became a true human being in the best sense of the word.”

“Do you think so?”

“We may never know. But he had changed, hadn’t he? The custody hearing declared him unfit to look after his own son. Yet that’s precisely what he did, and he even got the boy to blossom and begin to draw.”

“That’s true, Chief Inspector.”

“Call me Jan. People sometimes even call me Officer Bubble.”

“Is that because you’re so bubbly?”

“Ha, no, I don’t think so somehow. But I do know one thing for sure.”

“And what’s that?”

“That you’re...”

He got no further, but neither did he need to. Farah Sharif gave him a smile which in all its simplicity restored Bublanski’s belief in life and in God.

At 8.00 Salander got out of her bed on Fiskargatan. Once more she had not managed to get much sleep, and not only because she had been working at the encrypted N.S.A. file without getting anywhere at all. She had also been listening out for the sound of footsteps on the stairs and every now and then she checked her alarm and the surveillance camera on the landing.

She was no wiser than anyone else as to whether her sister had left the country. After her humiliation on Ingarö, it was by no means impossible that Camilla was preparing a new attack, with even greater force. The N.S.A. could also, at any moment, march into the apartment. Salander was under no illusions on either point. But this morning she dismissed all that. She went to the bathroom with resolute steps and took off her top to check her bullet wound. She thought it was finally beginning to look better, and in a mad moment she decided to take herself off to the boxing club on Hornsgatan for a session.

To drive out pain with pain.

Afterwards she was sitting exhausted in the changing room. She hardly had the energy to think. Her mobile buzzed. She ignored it. She went into the shower and let the warm water sprinkle over her. Gradually her thoughts cleared, and August’s drawing reappeared in her mind. But this time it wasn’t the illustration of the murderer which caught her attention — it was something at the bottom of the paper.

Salander had only had a very brief glimpse of the finished work at the summer house on Ingarö; at the time she had been concentrating on sending it to Bublanski and Modig. If she had given it any thought at all, then like everyone else she would have been fascinated by the detailed rendering. But now her photographic memory focused on the equation August had written at the bottom of the page, and she stepped out of the shower deep in thought. The only thing was, she could hardly hear herself think. Obinze was raising hell outside the changing room.

“Shut up,” she shouted back. “I’m thinking!”

But that did not help much. Obinze was absolutely furious, and anyone other than Salander would understand why. Obinze had been shocked at how weak and half-hearted her effort at the punchbag was, and had worried when she began to hang her head and grimace in pain. In the end he had surprised her by rushing over and rolling up the sleeve of her T-shirt, then to discover the bullet wound. He had gone completely crazy, and evidently had not calmed down even now.

“You’re an idiot, do you know that? A lunatic!” he shouted.

She was too weak to answer. Her strength deserted her completely, and what she had remembered from the drawing now faded from her mind. She sank down on the bench in the changing room next to Jamila Achebe. She used to both box and sleep with Jamila, usually in that order. When they fought their toughest bouts it often seemed like one long, wild foreplay. On a few occasions their behaviour in the shower had not been entirely decent. Neither of them set much store by etiquette.

“I actually agree with that noisy bastard out there. You’re not quite right in the head,” Jamila said.

“Maybe so,” Salander said.

“That wound looks nasty.”

“It’s healing.”

“But you needed to box?”

“Apparently.”

“Shall we go back to my place?”

Salander did not answer. Her mobile was buzzing again in her black bag. Three text messages with the same content from a withheld number. As she read them she balled up her fists and looked lethal. Jamila felt that it might be better to have sex with Salander another day instead.

Blomkvist had woken at 6.00 with some great ideas for the article, and on his way to the office the draft came together in his mind with no effort at all. He worked in deep concentration at the magazine and barely noticed what was going on around him, although sometimes he surfaced with thoughts of Zander.

He refused to give up hope, but he feared that Zander had given his life for the story, and he did what he could to honour his colleague with every sentence he wrote. On one level he intended the report to be a murder story about Frans and August Balder — an account of an eight-year-old autistic boy who sees his father shot, and who despite his disability finds a way of striking back. But on another level Blomkvist wanted it to be an instructive narrative about a new world of surveillance and espionage, where the boundaries between the legal and the criminal have been erased. The words came pouring out, but still it was not without its difficulties.

Through an old police contact he had got hold of the paperwork on the unsolved murder of Kajsa Falk, the girlfriend of one of the leading figures in Svavelsjö M.C. The killer had never been identified and none of the people questioned during the investigation had been willing to contribute anything of value, but Blomkvist nevertheless gathered that a violent rift had torn apart the motorcycle club and that there was an insidious terror among the gang members of a “Lady Zala”, as one of the witnesses put it.

Despite considerable efforts, the police had not managed to discover who or what the name referred to. But there was not the slightest doubt in Blomkvist’s mind that “Lady Zala” was Camilla, and that she was behind a whole series of other crimes, both in Sweden and abroad. But it was not easy to unearth any evidence, and that exasperated him. For the time being he referred to her in the article by her codename, Thanos.

Yet the biggest challenge was not Camilla or her shadowy connections to the Russian Duma. What bothered Blomkvist most was that he knew Needham would never have come all the way to Sweden and leaked top-secret information if he were not bent on hiding something even bigger. Needham was no fool, and he in turn knew that Blomkvist was not stupid either. He had therefore not tried to make any part of his account too pretty.

On the contrary, he painted a fairly dreadful picture of the N.S.A. And yet... a closer inspection of the information told Blomkvist that, all in all, Needham was describing an intelligence agency which both functioned well and behaved reasonably decently, if you ignored the revolting bunch of criminals in the department known as Protection of Strategic Technologies — the self-same department, as it happens, which had prevented Needham from nailing his hacker.

The American must have wanted to do serious harm to a few specific colleagues, but rather than sink the whole of his organization, he preferred to give it a softer landing in an already inevitable crash. So Blomkvist was not especially surprised or angry when Berger appeared behind him and with a worried expression handed him a T.T. telegram.

“Does this scupper our story?” she said.

The telegram read:

The telegram did not contain very much apart from the long quote; it said nothing about Balder’s murder and nothing that could be linked to the events in Stockholm. But Blomkvist understood what Berger meant. Now that the news was out, the Washington Post and the New York Times and a whole pack of serious American journalists would descend on the story, and it would be impossible to anticipate what they might dig up.

“Not good,” he said calmly. “But not a surprise.”

“Really?”

“It’s part of the same strategy that led the N.S.A. to seek me out: damage limitation. They want to take back the initiative.”

“How do you mean?”

“There’s a reason why they leaked this to me. I could tell right away that there was something odd about it. Why did Needham insist on coming to talk to me here in Stockholm, and at 5.00 in the morning?”

“So you think that what he’s doing is sanctioned higher up?”

“I suspected it, but at first I didn’t get what he was doing. I just felt that something was wrong. Then I talked to Salander.”

“And that clarified things?”

“I realized that Needham knew exactly what she’d dug up during her hacker attack, and he had every reason to fear that I would learn all about it. He wanted to limit the damage.”

“Even so, he hardly presented you with a rosy picture.”

“He knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with anything too pretty. I suspect he gave me just enough to keep me happy and let me have my scoop, and to prevent me from digging any deeper.”

“He’s in for a disappointment then.”

“Let’s at least hope so. But I can’t see how to break through. The N.S.A. is a closed door.”

“Even for an old bloodhound like Mikael Blomkvist?”

“Even for him.”

Chapter 30

The text message had said Salander could not work out if it had been sent three times in error or if it was an absurd attempt to be over-explicit. It made no difference now anyway.

The message was evidently from Camilla, but it added nothing to what Salander already knew. The events on Ingarö had only deepened the ancient hatred — she was certain Camilla would come after her again, having got so close.

It was not the wording of the texts that had upset Salander so much as the thoughts it had brought to mind, the memory of what she had seen on the steep rock slope in the early morning light when she and August had crouched on the narrow ledge in falling snow, gunfire rattling above them. August had not been wearing a jacket or shoes and was shivering violently as the seconds went by and Salander realized how desperately compromised their situation was. She had a child to take care of and a pathetic pistol for a weapon, while the bastards up there had assault rifles. She had to take them by surprise, otherwise she and August would be slaughtered like lambs. She listened to the men’s footsteps and the direction they were shooting in, even their breathing and the rustle of their clothes.

But the strange thing was, when she finally saw her chance, she hesitated. Crucial moments went by as she broke a small twig into pieces on the rock ledge in front of them. Only then did she spring to her feet right in front of the men and, taking advantage of that brief millisecond of surprise, she fired right away, two, three times. From experience she knew that moments like these burned an indelible impression on your mind, as if not only your body and muscles are sharpened, but also your perception.

Every detail shone with a strange precision and she saw each ripple in the landscape in front of her, as if through a camera zoom. She noted the surprise and fear in the men’s eyes, the wrinkles and irregularities in their faces and clothes, and the weapons which they were waving and firing off at random, narrowly missing their targets.

But her strongest impression did not come from any of that. It came from a silhouette further up the slope which she caught out of the corner of her eye, not menacing in itself, but it made more of an impact on her than the men she had shot. The silhouette was that of her sister. Salander would have recognized her a kilometre away, even though they had not seen each other for years. The air itself was poisoned by her presence and afterwards Salander wondered if she should have shot her too.

Camilla stood there a moment too long. It was careless of her to be out on the rock slope in the first place, but presumably she could not resist the temptation of seeing her sister being executed. Salander recalled how she half squeezed the trigger and felt a holy rage beating in her chest. Yet she hesitated for a split second, and that was enough. Camilla threw herself behind a rock and a scrawny figure appeared on the terrace and started shooting. Salander jumped back onto the ledge and tumbled down the slope with August.

Now, walking away from the boxing club, thinking back to it all, Salander’s body tightened in readiness for a new battle. It struck her that perhaps she should not go home at all, but leave the country for a while. But something else drove her back to her desk; what she had seen in her mind’s eye in the shower, before reading Camilla’s texts, and which was now occupying her thoughts more and more. August’s equation:

From a mathematical point of view, there was nothing unique or extraordinary about it. But what was so remarkable was that August had started with the random number she had given him at Ingarö and taken that further to develop a considerably better elliptic curve than the one she herself had made. When the boy had not wanted to go to sleep, she had left it on the bedside table. She had not got any answer then, nor even the slightest reaction, and she had gone to bed convinced that August understood nothing about mathematical abstractions, that he was only a kind of human calculator of prime-number factorizations.

But, my God... she had been wrong. August had stayed up in the night not just drawing; he had also perfected her own mathematics. She did not even take off her boots or leather jacket, she just stomped into her apartment and opened the encrypted N.S.A. file along with her program for the elliptic curves.

Then she rang Hanna Balder.

Hanna had scarcely slept because she had not brought any of her pills with her. Yet the hotel and its surroundings still cheered her. The breathtaking mountain scenery reminded her of how cramped her own existence had become. Slowly she began to unwind, and even the deep-seated fear in her body was beginning to let go. But that could have been wishful thinking. She also felt slightly at sea in such extravagant surroundings.

There had been a time when she would sail into rooms like these with perfect self-assurance: Look at me, here I come. Now she was timid and trembling and had difficulty eating anything even though the breakfast was lavish. August sat beside her, compulsively writing out his series of numbers, and he was not eating either, but he drank unbelievable volumes of freshly pressed orange juice.

Her new mobile rang, startling her. But it had to be the woman who had sent them here. Nobody else had the number, so far as she knew, and no doubt she just wanted to know if they had arrived safely. So Hanna answered cheerfully and launched into an effusive description of how wonderful everything at the hotel was. She was brusquely interrupted:

“Where are you?”

“We’re having breakfast.”

“In that case stop now and go up to your room. August and I have work to do.”

“Work?”

“I’m going to send over some equations I want him to take a look at. Is that clear?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just show them to August, and then call me and tell me what he’s written.”

“O.K.,” Hanna said, nonplussed.

She grabbed a couple of croissants and a cinnamon bun and walked with August to the lifts.

It was only at the outset that August helped her. But it was enough. Later she would see her mistakes more clearly and make new improvements to her program. Deep in concentration she worked on for hour after hour, until the sky darkened outside and the snow began to fall again. Then suddenly — in one of those moments she would remember for ever — something strange happened to the file. It fell apart. A shock ran through her. She punched the air.

She had found the secret keys and cracked the document, and for a little while she was so overcome by this that she hardly managed to read. Then she began to examine the contents, and her amazement grew with every passing moment. Could this even be possible? It was more explosive than anything she had imagined, and the reason it had all been written down could only have been that someone believed the R.S.A. algorithm was impenetrable. But here it was, black on white, all that filth and dirt. The text was full of internal jargon and strange abbreviations and cryptic references, but that was not a problem for Salander since she was familiar with the subject. She had got through about four-fifths of the text when the doorbell rang.

She chose to ignore it, probably only the postman. But then she remembered Camilla’s text message and checked the camera on the landing on her computer. She stiffened.

It was not Camilla but her other bugbear, the one she had almost forgotten with everything else that was going on. Ed the fucking Ned. He looked nothing like his pictures online, but he was unmistakable all the same. He looked grumpy and determined, and Salander’s brain started ticking. How had he managed to track her down? What should she do? The best she could come up with was to send the N.S.A. file off to Blomkvist on their P.G.P. link.

Then she shut down her computer and hauled herself to her feet to open the door.

What had happened to Bublanski? Sonja Modig was at a loss to understand it. The pained expression he had been wearing in recent weeks had vanished, as if blown away. Now he smiled and hummed to himself. It’s true that there was plenty to be pleased about. The murderer had been caught. August Balder had survived despite two attempts on his life, and the details of Frans Balder’s conflict and connection with the research company Solifon were becoming clearer.

But many questions remained, and the Bublanski she knew was not one to rejoice without good reason. He was more inclined to self-doubt, even in moments of triumph. She could not imagine what had got into him. He walked around the corridors beaming. Even now, as he sat in his office reading the dull report on the questioning of Zigmund Eckerwald by the San Francisco police, there was a smile on his lips.

“Sonja, my dear. There you are!”

She decided not to comment on the unwonted enthusiasm of his greeting and went straight to the point.

“Jan Holtser is dead.”

“Oh no.”

“And with him went our last hope of learning more about the Spiders.”

“So you think he was about to open up?”

“There was a chance, at least.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He broke down completely when his daughter showed up.”

“I didn’t know. What happened?”

“He has a daughter called Olga,” Modig said. “She came from Helsinki when she heard that her father had been injured. But when I talked to her and she heard that he had tried to kill a child, she went berserk.”

“In what way?”

“She stormed in to him and said something incredibly aggressive in Russian.”

“Could you understand what she was saying?”

“Something like he could die alone and she hated him.”

“So she laid into him.”

“Yes, and afterwards she told me that she would do everything in her power to help us with the investigation.”

“And how did Holtser react?”

“That’s what I was saying. For a moment I thought we had him. He was totally destroyed, had tears in his eyes. I’m not really big on that Catholic teaching which says that our moral worth is determined just before we die. But it was almost touching to see. This man who had done so much evil was crushed.”

“My rabbi—”

“Please, Jan, don’t start with your rabbi now. Let me go on. Holtser said what a terrible person he had been, so I told him that he should as a Christian take the opportunity to confess, and tell us who he was working for, and at that moment I’m convinced he came close. He hesitated and his eyes flitted from side to side. But instead of confessing he began to talk about Stalin.”

“Stalin?”

“About how Stalin didn’t punish only the guilty but also their children and grandchildren and the entire family. I think he was trying to say that his boss was the same.”

“So he was worried about his daughter.”

“However much she may have hated him, he was. I tried to tell him that we could get the girl onto a witness protection programme, but Holtser had started to drift away. He fell unconscious and died an hour later.”

“Anything else?”

“Only that someone we’re beginning to think may be a superintelligence has vanished and that we still have no trace of Andrei Zander.”

“I know, I know.”

“We’ve at least made progress on one front,” Modig said. “You remember the man identified by Amanda on August’s drawing of the traffic light?”

“The former actor?”

“That’s right, he’s called Roger Winter. Amanda interviewed him for background information, to find out whether there was a relationship between him and the boy or Balder, and I don’t think she expected to get much out of it. But Winter seemed to be badly shaken, and before Amanda had even begun to put pressure on him he confessed to a whole catalogue of sins.”

“Really?”

“And we’re not talking innocent stories. You know, Westman and Winter have been friends since they were young men at Revolutionsteatern and they used to get together to drink in the afternoons at the apartment in Torsgatan when Hanna was out. August would sit in the next room doing his puzzles, and neither of the men paid him much attention. But on one of these occasions the boy had been given a thick maths book by his mother — it was clearly way above his level, but he still leafed through it frantically, making excited noises. Lasse became irritated and grabbed the book from the boy and threw it in the bin. It seems August went completely crazy. He had some sort of fit, and Lasse kicked him several times.”

“That’s appalling.”

“That was just the beginning. After that August became very odd, Roger said. The boy took to glaring at them with this weird look, and one day Roger found that his jeans jacket had been cut into tiny pieces, and another day someone had emptied out all the beer in the fridge and smashed all the bottles of spirits. It turned into some kind of trench warfare, and I suspect that Roger and Lasse in their alcoholic delirium began to imagine all sorts of strange things about the boy, and even became scared of him. The psychological aspect of this isn’t easy to understand. Roger said it made him feel like shit, and he never talked about it with Lasse afterwards. He didn’t want to beat the boy. But he couldn’t stop himself. It was as if he got his own childhood back, he said.”

“What on earth did he mean by that?”

“It’s not altogether clear. Apparently Roger Winter has a disabled younger brother. Throughout their childhood Roger was a constant disappointment, while his talented brother was showered with praise and distinctions, and appreciated in every possible way. I guess that bred some bitterness. Maybe Roger was subconsciously getting his own back on his brother. Or else...”

“Or else what?”

“He put it in an odd way. He said it felt as if he were trying to beat the shame out of himself.”

“That’s sick.”

“Yes. Strangest thing of all is the way he suddenly confessed everything. It was almost as if he wanted to be arrested. Amanda said he was limping and had two black eyes.”

“Peculiar.”

“Isn’t it? But there’s one other thing which surprises me even more,” Modig said.

“And what’s that?”

“That my boss, that brooding old grouch, has become a little ray of sunshine.”

Bublanski looked embarrassed. “So it shows.”

“It shows.”

“Well, yes,” he stammered. “It’s just that a woman has agreed to come out to dinner with me.”

“You haven’t gone and fallen in love, have you?”

“It’s just dinner,” Bublanski said, blushing.

Needham did not enjoy it. But he knew the rules of the game. It was like being back in Dorchester. Whatever you did, you could not back down. If Salander wanted to play hardball, he would show her hardball. He glared at her. But it did not get him very far.

She glared back and did not say a word. It felt like a duel, and in the end Needham looked away. This whole thing was ridiculous. The girl had been unmasked and crushed after all. He had cracked her secret identity and tracked her down, and she should be grateful that he wasn’t marching in with the Marines to arrest her.

“You think you’re pretty tough, don’t you?” he said.

“I don’t like surprise visits.”

“I don’t like people who break into my system, so we’re square. Maybe you’d like to know how I found you?”

“I couldn’t care less.”

“It was via your company in Gibraltar. Not too smart to call it Wasp Enterprises.”

“Apparently not.”

“For a smart girl, you make a lot of mistakes.”

“For a clever boy, you work for a pretty rotten set-up.”

“You got me there. But we’re a necessary evil in this wicked world.”

“Especially with guys like Jonny Ingram around.”

He was not expecting that. He really was not expecting that. But he would not let it show.

“You have quite a sense of humour,” he said.

“It’s hilarious, isn’t it? To have people murdered and to work together with villains in the Russian Duma making megabucks and saving your own skin, that’s really comical, isn’t it?” she said.

For a moment he could barely breathe. He could no longer keep up the pretence. Where the hell had she got that from? He felt dizzy. But then he realized — and that slowed his pulse a little — that she was bluffing. If he believed her even for one second it was only because in his worst moments he too had imagined that Ingram might be guilty of something like that. But Needham knew better than anyone that there was not a shred of evidence of such a thing.

“Don’t try to bullshit me,” he growled. “I have the same material you do and a lot more besides.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Ed, unless you too have the private keys to Ingram’s R.S.A. algorithm?”

Needham looked at her and told himself that this could not be true. Surely she could not have cracked the encryption? Not even he, with all the resources and experts at his disposal, had thought it was even worth trying.

But now she was suggesting... No, it was impossible. Maybe she had a mole in Ingram’s inner circle? No, that was just as far-fetched.

“This is how it is, Ed,” she said in a new authoritative tone. “You told Blomkvist that you would leave me in peace if I told you how I carried out my data breach. It’s possible you’re telling the truth there. It’s also possible that you’re lying, or that you won’t have any say in the matter anyway. You could get the sack. I don’t see any case at all for trusting you or the people you work for.”

Needham took a deep breath.

“I respect your attitude,” he said. “But I’m a man of my word. Not because I’m a particularly decent person. I’m a vengeful maniac, just like you, young lady. But I wouldn’t have survived as long as I have if I let people down when it matters. You can either believe that or not. I swear to you though, I will make your life hell if you don’t open up.”

“You’re a tough guy,” she said. “But you’re also a proud bugger, aren’t you? You need to make absolutely sure that no-one ever gets wind of my breach, whatever the cost. But as to that, I’m ridiculously well prepared. Every detail of it would be made public before you even have time to blink. I don’t in fact want to do it, but I will humiliate you if I have to.”

“You’re full of shit.”

“I wouldn’t have survived either if I was full of shit,” she said. “I hate this society where we’re watched over all the time. I’ve had enough of Big Brother and authorities in my life. But I’m prepared to do something for you, Ed. If you can keep your trap shut, I can give you information that will put you in a stronger position, and help you clear out the rotten apples in Fort Meade. I’m not telling you anything about my breach — only because it’s a matter of principle for me. But I can help you get your own back on the bastards.”

Ed stared at the strange woman in front of him. Then he did something which would surprise him for a long time.

He burst out laughing. He laughed until he cried.

Chapter 31

Levin woke up in a good mood at Häringe castle after a long conference about the digitalization of the media, which had ended with a big party where the champagne and hard liquor had flowed. A failure of a trade-union representative from the Norwegian newspaper Kveldsbladet had remarked spitefully that Serner’s parties “grow more lavish the more people you sack”, and made a bit of scene which resulted in Levin getting red wine on his tailor-made jacket. But he was happy to let him have that. Especially since it had enabled him to get Natalie Foss up to his hotel room in the small hours. Natalie was twenty-seven and sexy as hell, and despite the fact that he was drunk Levin had managed to have sex with her both last night and this morning.

Now it was already 9.00 and his mobile was pinging and he had more of a hangover than was good for him, bearing in mind all the things he had to do. On the other hand he was a champion in this discipline. “Work hard, play hard” was his motto. And Natalie, Jesus! — how many fifty-year-olds could pull a bird like that? But now he had to get up. He was dizzy as he lurched to the bathroom for a pee. Then he checked his share portfolio. It was usually a good way to start hungover mornings. He picked up his mobile and went into Internet banking.

Something must be wrong, some technical mishap he could not understand. His portfolio had crashed, and as he sat there, shaking and skimming through his assets, he noticed something peculiar. His large holding in Solifon had as good as evaporated. He was beside himself as he went into the stock-exchange sites and saw the same headline everywhere:

What he did next is unclear. He probably yelled and swore and banged his fists on the table. He vaguely remembered Natalie waking up, asking what was going on. But the only thing he knew for sure was that he kneeled for a long time over the toilet bowl, vomiting as if there were no end to it.

Grane’s desk at Säpo had been tidied. She would not be coming back. Now she sat there for a little while, leaning back in her chair and reading Millennium. The first page was not what she had expected from a magazine serving up the scoop of the century. It was black, elegant, sombre. There were no pictures. At the top it said:

And further down:

Page two consisted of a close-up of Zander. Even though Grane had never met him, she was moved. Zander looked beautiful and a little vulnerable. His smile was searching, tentative. There was something at once intense and unsure about him. In an accompanying text Erika Berger wrote about how Zander’s parents had been killed by a bomb in Sarajevo. She went on to say that he had loved Millennium magazine, the poet Leonard Cohen and Antonio Tabucchi’s novel Pereira Maintains. He dreamed of the great love and the great scoop. His favourite films were “Dark Eyes” by Nikita Mikhalkov and “Love Actually” by Richard Curtis. Berger praised his report on Stockholm’s homeless as a piece of classic journalism. And even though Zander hated people who offended others, he himself refused to speak ill of anyone. The piece went on:

The report ran to more than thirty pages of the magazine and was perhaps the best piece of journalistic prose Grane had ever read. She sometimes had tears in her eyes, but still she smiled when she came to the words:

The basic story was simple. A group of individuals under Commander Jonny Ingram — who ranked just below the N.S.A. head, Admiral Charles O’Connor, and had close contacts with the White House and Congress — had begun to exploit the vast numbers of trade secrets in the hands of his organization for their own gain. He had been assisted by a group of business-intelligence analysts at Solifon’s research department “Y”.

If the matter had stopped there, it would have been a scandal which was in some way comprehensible. But the course of events followed its own evil own logic when a criminal group — the Spiders — entered the drama. Mikael Blomkvist had evidence to show how Jonny Ingram had got together with the notorious Russian Duma member Ivan Gribanov and “Thanos”, the mysterious leader of the Spiders, to plunder tech companies of ideas and new technology worth astronomical sums of money, and to sell it all on. But they really plumbed the depths of moral depravity when Professor Frans Balder picked up their tracks and it was decided to eliminate him. That was the most astonishing part of the story. One of the most senior executives at the N.S.A. had known that a leading Swedish researcher was going to be murdered and did not lift a finger to prevent it.

It was not the account of the political quagmire that most engaged Grane, but rather the human drama. There Blomkvist’s gifts as a writer were on full display. She shuddered at the creeping realization that we live in a twisted world where everything, both big and small, is subject to surveillance, and where anything worth money will always be exploited.

Just as she finished reading she noticed someone standing in the doorway. It was Helena Kraft, beautifully dressed as always.

Grane could not help remembering how she had suspected Kraft of being the leak in the investigation. What she had taken to be guilty shame had been Kraft’s regret at the unprofessional way in which the investigation was being conducted — at least that is what she had been told during their long conversation after Mårten Nielsen confessed and was arrested.

“I can’t begin to say how sorry I am to see you go,” Kraft said.

“Everything has its time.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re going to do?”

“I’m moving to New York. I want to work in human rights, and, as you know, I’ve had an offer on the table from the U.N. for some time.”

“It’s a loss for us, Gabriella. But you deserve it.”

“So my betrayal’s been forgiven?”

“Not by all of us, I can assure you. But I see it as a sign of your good character.”

“Thanks, Helena. Will I see you later at the Pressklubben’s memorial for Andrei Zander?”

“I’m afraid I have to do a presentation for the government on this whole mess. But later this evening I’ll raise a glass to young Zander, and to you, Gabriella.”

Alona Casales was sitting at a distance, contemplating the panic with an inward smile. She observed Admiral O’Connor crossing the floor, looking like a bullied schoolboy rather than the head of the world’s most powerful intelligence organization. But then all the powerful figures at the N.S.A. were feeling put-upon and pathetic today, all of them apart from Needham, that is.

Needham was not in a good mood either. He waved his arms around and was sweaty and bilious. But he exuded all his usual authority. It was obvious that even O’Connor was afraid of him. Needham had come back from Stockholm with real dynamite, and had caused a huge row and insisted on a complete shake-up throughout the organization. The head of the N.S.A. was not going to thank him for that; he probably felt like sending Needham to Siberia — immediately and for ever.

But there was nothing he could do. He looked small as he approached Needham, who did not even bother to turn in his direction. Needham ignored the head of the N.S.A. in the same way he ignored all the other poor bastards he had no time for, and plainly nothing improved for O’Connor once the conversation got going.

For the most part Needham seemed dismissive and, even though Casales could not hear what was going on, she could imagine what was being said, or rather, what was not being said. Over the course of her own long conversations with Needham he refused to say one word about the way he had got hold of the information. He was not, even on a single point, going to compromise, and she respected that.

Now he seemed determined to exploit the situation for all it was worth, and Casales solemnly swore that she would stand up for integrity in the agency and give Needham as much backing as she could if he ran into any problems. She also swore to herself that she would call Gabriella Grane in a final bid to ask her out, if the rumour was true that she was on her way over here.

Needham was not in fact deliberately ignoring the N.S.A. head. But nor was he going to interrupt what he was doing — yelling at two of his controllers — just because the admiral was standing at his desk. Only after about a minute did he address him and then in fact he said something quite friendly, not to ingratiate himself or compensate for his nonchalance, but because he really meant it.

“You did a good job at the press conference.”

“Did I?” the admiral said. “It was hell.”

“Well, you can thank me then, for giving you time to prepare.”

“Thank you? Are you kidding? Every news site around the world is posting pictures of Ingram and me together. I’m guilty by association.”

“In that case for Christ’s sake keep your own people in line from now on.”

“How dare you talk to me like that?”

“I’ll talk however the hell I want. We’re in the middle of a crisis and I’m responsible for security. I don’t get paid for being polite.”

“Watch what you say...” O’Connor began.

But he was completely thrown when Needham suddenly stood up, big as a bear, either to stretch his back or to assert his authority.

“I sent you to Sweden to clean all this up,” the admiral went on. “Instead when you came back everything was a complete disaster.”

“The disaster had already happened,” Needham snapped. “You know it as well as I do.”

“So how do you explain all the shit that ended up in that Swedish magazine?”

“I’ve explained it to you a thousand times.”

“Right, your hacker. Guesswork and bullshit is what I call it.”

Needham had promised to keep Wasp out of this mess, and it was a promise he was going to keep.

“Top-quality bullshit in that case, don’t you think?” he said. “That damn hacker, whoever he may be, must have cracked Ingram’s files and leaked them to Millennium. That’s bad, I agree. But do you know what’s worse? What’s worse is that we had the chance to cut the hacker’s balls off and put an end to the leaking. But then we were ordered to shut down our investigation. Let’s not pretend you went out of your way to stand up for me then.”

“I sent you to Stockholm.”

“But you called off my guys and our entire investigation came to a grinding halt. Now the tracks are covered, and what good would it do us if it came out that some lousy little hacker had taken us for a ride?”

“Not a lot, probably. But we can still make trouble for Millennium and that reporter Blomström, believe you me.”

“It’s Blomkvist, actually. Mikael Blomkvist. And be my guest. You’d really do well in the popularity stakes if you marched in on Swedish territory and arrested the world’s most celebrated journalist right now,” Needham said.

O’Connor muttered something inaudible and stormed off.

Needham knew as well as anyone that O’Connor was fighting for political survival and could not afford to make any reckless moves. He himself was fed up with working his fingers to the bone, and he loped over to Casales to chat with her instead. He was in the mood for something irresponsible.

“Let’s go get hammered and forget this whole fucking mess.”

Hanna Balder was standing in her snow boots on the little hill outside Hotel Schloss Elmau. She gave August a push and watched him whizz down the slope on the old-fashioned wooden toboggan the hotel had lent them. He came to a stop near a brown barn. Even though there was a glimmer of sunshine, a light snow was falling. There was hardly any wind. In the far distance the mountain peaks touched the sky and wide-open spaces stretched out before her.

Hanna had never stayed in such a wonderful place, and August was recovering well, not least thanks to Charles Edelman’s efforts. But none of it was easy. She felt terrible. Even here on the slope she had stopped twice and felt her chest. Withdrawal from her pills — benzodiazepines — was worse than she could have imagined. At night she would lie in bed curled up like a shrimp and examine her life in the most unsparing light, sometimes banging her fist against the wall and crying. She cursed Lasse Westman, and she cursed herself.

And yet... there were times when she felt strangely purified and occasionally she came close to being happy. There were moments when August was sitting with his equations and his number series and he would even answer her questions — albeit in monosyllables and somewhat odd terms.

The boy was still an enigma to her. Sometimes he spoke in numbers, in high numbers to the power of even higher numbers, and seemed to think that she would understand. But something had indeed changed, and she would never forget how she had seen August sitting at the desk in their hotel room that first day, writing out long winding equations which poured from him with amazing fluency, and which she photographed and sent on to the woman in Stockholm. Late that evening a text message had come in on her Blackphone:

She had never seen her son so happy and proud. Even though she could have no idea what it was all about and never mentioned it, even to Edelman, it meant the world to her. She began to feel proud too, immeasurably proud.

She developed a passionate interest in savant syndrome, and when Charles was staying at the hotel they often sat up after August had gone to bed and talked into the small hours about her son’s abilities, and about everything else too.

She was not sure that it had been such a good idea to jump into bed with Charles. Yet she was not sure it had been a bad idea either. Charles reminded her of Frans. They formed a little family of sorts: she, August, Charles, Charlotte Greber, the rather strict but kind teacher, and the Danish mathematician Jens Nyrup who visited them. Their whole stay was a voyage of discovery into her son’s remarkable universe. As she now sauntered down the snowy hill and August got up from the toboggan, she felt, for the first time in ages, she would become a better mother, and she would sort out her life.

Blomkvist could not understand why his body felt so heavy. It was as if he were trying to move through water. And yet there was a commotion going on out there, a victory celebration. Nearly every newspaper, website, radio station and T.V. channel wanted to interview him. He did not accept any of the requests. When Millennium had published big news stories in the past, he and Berger had not been sure whether other media companies would latch on to them. They had needed to think strategically, to make sure they were syndicated in the right places and sometimes even shared their scoop. Now none of that was necessary.

The news broke with a bang all by itself. When N.S.A. head Charles O’Connor and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Stella Parker appeared at a joint press conference to apologize publicly for what had happened, the last lingering doubts about the story’s credibility were dispelled. Now a heated debate was raging on editorial pages around the world about the consequences and implications of the disclosures.

But in spite of all the fuss and the telephones which never stopped ringing, Berger had decided to arrange a last-minute party at the office. She felt they deserved to escape from all the hullaballoo for a little while and raise a glass or two. A first print run of fifty thousand copies had sold out the previous morning and the number of hits on their website, which also had an English version, had reached several million. Offers of book contracts poured in, their subscription base was growing by the minute and advertisers were queuing up to be part of it all.

They had also bought out Serner Media. Berger had managed to push the deal through a few days earlier, though it had been anything but easy. Serner’s representatives had sensed her desperation and taken full advantage, and for a while she and Blomkvist had thought that it would prove beyond them. Only at the eleventh hour, when a substantial contribution came in from an unknown company in Gibraltar, bringing a smile to Blomkvist’s face, had they been able to buy out the Norwegians. The price had been outrageously high, given the situation, but it was still a minor coup when a day later the magazine’s scoop was published and the market value of the Millennium brand rocketed. They were free and independent again, though they had hardly had time yet to enjoy it.

Journalists and photographers had even hounded them during Zander’s memorial at Pressklubben. Without exception they had wanted to offer congratulations, but Blomkvist felt smothered, and his responses had not been as gracious as he would have liked them to be. The sleepless nights and headaches continued to plague him.

Now, in the late afternoon of the following day, the furniture in the office had been hurriedly rearranged. Champagne, wine and beer and catered Japanese food had been set out on the desks. And people started to stream in, first the staff and freelancers, then a number of friends of the magazine, among them Holger Palmgren. Mikael helped him out of the lift and the two embraced.

“Our girl made it,” Palmgren said, with tears in his eyes.

“She generally does,” Blomkvist replied with a smile. He installed Palmgren in the place of honour on the sofa and gave instructions that his glass was to be kept filled.

It was good to see him there. It was good to see all sorts of old and new friends. Gabriella Grane was there too, and Chief Inspector Bublanski, who probably should not have been invited, in view of their professional relationship and Millennium’s status as independent watchdog over the police force, but Blomkvist had wanted him to be there. Officer Bubble spent the whole evening talking to Professor Farah Sharif.

Blomkvist drank a toast with them and the others. He was wearing jeans and his best jacket, and, unusually for him, he had quite a lot to drink. But he could not shake off that empty, leaden feeling and that was because of Zander of course. Andrei was constantly in his thoughts. The moment in the office when his colleague had so nearly taken up his offer of a beer was etched in his mind, a moment which was both humdrum and life-determining. Memories of the young man came to him all the time, and Blomkvist had difficulty concentrating on conversations.

He had had enough of all the praise and flattery — the only tribute that did affect him was Pernilla’s text: — and occasionally he glanced over towards the door. Naturally Lisbeth Salander had been invited, and would have been the guest of honour had she turned up. Blomkvist had wanted to thank her for the handsome contribution to help close out the Serner dispute. But there was no sign of her. What did he expect?

Her sensational decrypted document had allowed him to unravel the whole story, and had even persuaded Needham and the head of Solifon, Nicolas Grant, to give him more details. But he had heard from Salander only once since then: when he had interviewed her — to the extent that was possible — over the Redphone app about what had happened at the summer house out on Ingarö.

That was a week ago now and Blomkvist had no idea what she thought of his article. Maybe she was angry that he had dramatized it too much — he had had no choice but to fill in the blanks around the meagre answers she gave. Or perhaps she was furious because he had not mentioned Camilla by name but had simply referred to her as a Swedish — Russian woman known as Thanos. Or else she was disappointed that he had not taken a harder line across the board.

It was impossible to know. Things were not improved by the fact that Chief Prosecutor Ekström really did appear to be considering a case against Salander: unlawful deprivation of liberty and seizure of property were the charges he was trying to cobble together.

Eventually Blomkvist got fed up with it all and left the party without saying goodbye. The weather was awful and for lack of anything better to do he scrolled through his text messages. There were congratulations and requests for interviews and a couple of indecent proposals. But nothing from Salander. He switched off his mobile and trudged home with surprisingly heavy steps for the man who had just pulled off the scoop of the century.

Salander was sitting in Fiskargatan on her red sofa, gazing emptily out at Gamla Stan and Riddarfjärden. It was a little over a year since she had started the hunt for her sister and her father’s criminal legacy, and she had to admit to her success on many counts.

She had tracked down Camilla and dealt the Spiders a serious blow. The connections with Solifon and the N.S.A. had been severed. Ivan Gribanov, the Duma member, was coming under tremendous pressure in Moscow, Camilla’s hit man was dead and her closest henchman Jurij Bogdanov and several other computer engineers were wanted by the police and forced to go underground. But Camilla was alive out there somewhere. Nothing was over. Salander had only winged her quarry and that was not enough. Grimly she looked down at the coffee table, where a packet of cigarettes and her unread copy of Millennium lay. She picked up the magazine and put it down again. Then she picked it up once more and read Blomkvist’s report. When she reached the last sentence she stared for a while at the new photograph next to his byline. Then she jumped to her feet and went to the bathroom to put on some make-up. She pulled on a tight black T-shirt and a leather jacket and went out into the December evening.

She was freezing. It was crazy to be wearing so little, but she did not care. She cut down towards Mariatorget with quick steps, turned left into Swedenborgsgatan and walked into a restaurant called Süd, where she sat down at the bar and alternated between whisky and beer. Since much of the clientele came from the world of culture and journalism, it was hardly surprising that many of them recognized her. Guitarist Johan Norberg, for example, who wrote a regular column for We and was known for picking up on small yet significant details, observed that Salander was not drinking as if she enjoyed it, but rather as if it she had to get it out of the way.

There was something very determined about her body language, and a cognitive behavioural therapist who happened to be sitting at a table further in even wondered if Salander was aware of anyone else in the restaurant. She hardly looked out over the room and seemed to be preparing herself for some kind of operation or action.

At 9.15 she paid in cash and stepped into the night without a word or gesture.

Despite the cold, Blomkvist walked home slowly, deep in gloom. A smile only crossed his lips when he ran into some of the regulars outside the Bishops Arms.

“So you weren’t washed up after all!” Arne, or whatever his name was, bellowed.

“Maybe not quite yet,” Blomkvist said. For a moment he considered having a last beer inside and chatting with Amir.

But he felt too miserable. He wanted to be alone, so he carried on the entrance door of his building. On the way up the stairs he was overcome by a vague sense of unease, maybe as a result of all he had been through. He tried to dismiss it, but it would not go away, especially when he realized that a light had blown on the top floor. It was pitch black up there.

He slowed his steps and sensed a movement. There was a flicker, a weak sliver of light as if from a mobile, and a figure like a ghost, a slight person with dark flashing eyes could be made out standing in the stairwell.

“Who’s that?” he said, frightened.

Then he saw it was Salander.

He brightened at first and opened his arms, but she looked furious. Her eyes were rimmed with black and her body seemed coiled, as if prepared for an attack.

“Are you angry with me?” he said.

“Quite.”

“Why is that?”

Salander took a step forward, her face shining and pale, and he remembered her gunshot wound.

“Because I come to visit, and there’s no-one at home,” she said, and he walked towards her.

“That’s a bit of a scandal, isn’t it?” he said.

“I’d say so.”

“What if I ask you in now?”

“Then I suppose I’ll have to accept.”

“In that case, welcome,” he said, and for the first time in ages a broad smile spread across his face.

A star fell outside in the night sky.