The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

CHAPTER 1

Dr Jonasson was woken by Nurse Nicander five minutes before the helicopter was expected to land. It was just before 1.30 in the morning.

“What?” he said, confused.

“Rescue Service helicopter coming in. Two patients. An injured man and a younger woman. The woman has a gunshot wound.”

“Alright,” Jonasson said wearily.

He felt groggy although he had slept for only half an hour. He was on the night shift in A.&E. at Sahlgrenska hospital in Göteborg. It had been a strenuous evening. Since he had come on duty at 6.00 p.m., the hospital had received four victims of a head-on collision outside Lindome. One was pronounced D.O.A. He had treated a waitress whose legs had been scalded in an accident at a restaurant on Avenyn, and he had saved the life of a four-year-old boy who arrived at the hospital with respiratory failure after swallowing the wheel of a toy car. He had patched up a girl who had ridden her bike into a ditch that the road-repair department had chosen to dig close to the end of a bike path; the warning barriers had been tipped into the hole. She had fourteen stitches in her face and would need two new front teeth. Jonasson had also sewn part of a thumb back on to an enthusiastic carpenter who had managed to slice it off.

By 12.30 the steady flow of emergency cases had eased off. He had made a round to check on the state of his patients, and then gone back to the staff bedroom to try to rest for a while. He was on duty until 6.00 in the morning, and seldom got the chance to sleep even if no emergency patients came in. But this time he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he turned out the light.

Nurse Nicander handed him a cup of tea. She had not been given any details about the incoming cases.

Jonasson saw lightning out over the sea. He knew that the helicopter was coming in in the nick of time. All of a sudden a heavy downpour lashed at the window. The storm had moved in over Göteborg.

He heard the sound of the chopper and watched as it banked through the storm squalls down towards the helipad. For a second he held his breath when the pilot seemed to have difficulty controlling the aircraft. Then it vanished from his field of view and he heard the engine slowing to land. He took a hasty swallow of his tea and set down the cup.

Jonasson met them in the emergency admissions area. The other doctor on duty, Katarina Holm, took on the first patient who was wheeled in – an elderly man with his head bandaged, apparently with a serious wound to the face. Jonasson was left with the second patient, the woman who had been shot. He did a quick visual examination: it looked like she was a teenager, very dirty and bloody, and severely wounded. He lifted the blanket that the Rescue Service had wrapped round her body and saw that the wounds to her hip and shoulder were bandaged with duct tape, which he considered a pretty clever idea. The tape kept bacteria out and the blood in. One bullet had entered the outer side of her hip and gone straight through the muscle tissue. Then he gently raised her shoulder and located the entry wound in her back. There was no exit wound: the round was still inside her shoulder. He hoped it had not penetrated her lung, and since he did not see any blood in the woman’s mouth he concluded that probably it had not.

“Radiology,” he told the nurse in attendance. That was all he needed to say.

Then he cut away the bandage that the emergency team had wrapped round her skull. He froze when he saw another entry wound. The woman had been shot in the head and there was no exit wound there either.

Dr Jonasson paused for a second, looking down at the girl. He felt dejected. He had often described his job as being like that of a goalkeeper. Every day people came to his place of work in varying conditions but with one objective: to get help. It could be an old woman who had collapsed from a heart attack in the Nordstan galleria, or a fourteen-year-old boy whose left lung had been pierced by a screwdriver, or a teenage girl who had taken ecstasy and danced for eighteen hours straight before collapsing, blue in the face. They were victims of accidents at work or of violent abuse at home. They were tiny children savaged by dogs on Vasaplatsen, or Handy Harrys, who only meant to saw a few planks with their Black&Deckers and in some mysterious way managed to slice right into their wrist-bones.

So Dr Jonasson was the goalkeeper who stood between the patient and Fonus Funeral Service. His job was to decide what to do. If he made the wrong decision, the patient might die or perhaps wake up disabled for life. Most often he made the right decision, because the vast majority of injured people had an obvious and specific problem. A stab wound to the lung or a crushing injury after a car crash were both particular and recognizable problems that could be dealt with. The survival of the patient depended on the extent of the damage and on Dr Jonasson’s skill.

There were two kinds of injury that he hated. One was a serious burn case, because no matter what measures he took it would almost inevitably result in a lifetime of suffering. The second was an injury to the brain.

The girl on the gurney could live with a piece of lead in her hip and a piece of lead in her shoulder. But a piece of lead inside her brain was a trauma of a wholly different magnitude. He was suddenly aware of Nurse Nicander saying something.

“Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”

“It’s her.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s Lisbeth Salander. The girl they’ve been hunting for the past few weeks, for the triple murder in Stockholm.”

Jonasson looked again at the unconscious patient’s face. He realized at once that Nurse Nicander was right. He and the whole of Sweden had seen her passport photograph on billboards outside every newspaper kiosk for weeks. And now the murderer herself had been shot, which was surely poetic justice of a sort.

But that was not his concern. His job was to save his patient’s life, irrespective of whether she was a triple murderer or a Nobel Prize winner. Or both.

Then the efficient chaos, the same in every A.&E. the world over, erupted. The staff on Jonasson’s shift set about their appointed tasks. Salander’s clothes were cut away. A nurse reported on her blood pressure – 100/70 – while the doctor put his stethoscope to her chest and listened to her heartbeat. It was surprisingly regular, but her breathing was not quite normal.

Jonasson did not hesitate to classify Salander’s condition as critical. The wounds in her shoulder and hip could wait until later with a compress on each, or even with the duct tape that some inspired soul had applied. What mattered was her head. Jonasson ordered tomography with the new and improved C.T. scanner that the hospital had lately acquired.

Dr Anders Jonasson was blond and blue-eyed, originally from Umeå in northern Sweden. He had worked at Sahlgrenska and Eastern hospitals for twenty years, by turns as researcher, pathologist, and in A.&E. He had achieved something that astonished his colleagues and made the rest of the medical staff proud to work with him; he had vowed that no patient would die on his shift, and in some miraculous way he had indeed managed to hold the mortality rate at zero. Some of his patients had died, of course, but it was always during subsequent treatment or for completely different reasons that had nothing to do with his interventions.

He had a view of medicine that was at times unorthodox. He thought doctors often drew conclusions that they could not substantiate. This meant that they gave up far too easily; alternatively they spent too much time at the acute stage trying to work out exactly what was wrong with the patient so as to decide on the right treatment. This was correct procedure, of course. The problem was that the patient was in danger of dying while the doctor was still doing his thinking.

But Jonasson had never before had a patient with a bullet in her skull. Most likely he would need a brain surgeon. He had all the theoretical knowledge required to make an incursion into the brain, but he did not by any means consider himself a brain surgeon. He felt inadequate but all of a sudden realized that he might be luckier than he deserved. Before he scrubbed up and put on his operating clothes he sent for Nurse Nicander.

“There’s an American professor from Boston called Frank Ellis, working at the Karolinska hospital in Stockholm. He happens to be in Göteborg tonight, staying at the Radisson on Avenyn. He just gave a lecture on brain research. He’s a good friend of mine. Could you get the number?”

While Jonasson was still waiting for the X-rays, Nurse Nicander came back with the number of the Radisson. Jonasson picked up the telephone. The night porter at the Radisson was very reluctant to wake a guest at that time of night and Jonasson had to come up with a few choice phrases about the critical nature of the situation before his call was put through.

“Good morning, Frank,” Jonasson said when the call was finally answered. “It’s Anders. Do you feel like coming over to Sahlgrenska to help out in a brain op.?”

“Are you bullshitting me?” Ellis had lived in Sweden for many years and was fluent in Swedish – albeit with an American accent – but when Jonasson spoke to him in Swedish, Ellis always replied in his mother tongue.

“I’m sorry I missed your lecture, Frank, but I hoped you might be able to give me private lessons. I’ve got a young woman here who’s been shot in the head. Entry wound just above the left ear. I badly need a second opinion, and I don’t know of a better person to ask.”

“So it’s serious?” Ellis sat up and swung his feet out of bed. He rubbed his eyes.

“She’s mid-twenties, entry wound, no exit.”

“And she’s alive?”

“Weak but regular pulse, less regular breathing, blood pressure is 100/70. She also has a bullet wound in her shoulder and another in her hip. But I know how to handle those two.”

“Sounds promising,” Ellis said.

“Promising?”

“If somebody has a bullet in their head and they’re still alive, that points to hopeful.”

“I understand… Frank, can you help me out?”

“I spent the evening in the company of good friends, Anders. I got to bed at 1.00 and no doubt I have an impressive blood alcohol content.”

“I’ll make the decisions and do the surgery. But I need somebody to tell me if I’m doing anything stupid. Even a falling-down drunk Professor Ellis is several classes better than I could ever be when it comes to assessing brain damage.”

“O.K. I’ll come. But you’re going to owe me one.”

“I’ll have a taxi waiting outside by the time you get down to the lobby. The driver will know where to drop you, and Nurse Nicander will be there to meet you and get you kitted out.”

Ellis had raven-black hair with a touch of grey, and a dark five-o’clock shadow. He looked like a bit player in E.R. The tone of his muscles testified to the fact that he spent a number of hours each week at the gym. He pushed up his glasses and scratched the back of his neck. He focused his gaze on the computer screen, which showed every nook and cranny of the patient Salander’s brain.

Ellis liked living in Sweden. He had first come as an exchange researcher in the late ’70s and stayed for two years. Then he came back regularly, until one day he was offered a permanent position at the Karolinska in Stockholm. By that time he had won an international reputation.

He had first met Jonasson at a seminar in Stockholm fourteen years earlier and discovered that they were both fly-fishing enthusiasts. They had kept in touch and had gone on fishing trips to Norway and elsewhere. But they had never worked together.

“I’m sorry for chasing you down, but…”

“Not a problem.” Ellis gave a dismissive wave. “But it’ll cost you a bottle of Cragganmore the next time we go fishing.”

“O.K., that’s a fee I’ll gladly pay.”

“I had a patient a number of years ago, in Boston – I wrote about the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was a girl the same age as your patient here. She was walking to the university when someone shot her with a crossbow. The arrow entered at the outside edge of her left eyebrow and went straight through her head, exiting from almost the middle of the back of her neck.”

“And she survived?”

“She looked like nothing on earth when she came in. We cut off the arrow shaft and put her head in a C.T. scanner. The arrow went straight through her brain. By all known reckoning she should have been dead, or at least suffered such massive trauma that she would have been in a coma.”

“And what was her condition?”

“She was conscious the whole time. Not only that; she was terribly frightened, of course, but she was completely rational. Her only problem was that she had an arrow through her skull.”

“What did you do?”

“Well, I got the forceps and pulled out the arrow and bandaged the wounds. More or less.”

“And she lived to tell the tale?”

“Obviously her condition was critical, but the fact is we could have sent her home the same day. I’ve seldom had a healthier patient.”

Jonasson wondered whether Ellis was pulling his leg.

“On the other hand,” Ellis went on, “I had a 42-year-old patient in Stockholm some years ago who banged his head on a windowsill. He began to feel sick immediately and was taken by ambulance to A.&E. When I got to him he was unconscious. He had a small bump and a very slight bruise. But he never regained consciousness and died after nine days in intensive care. To this day I have no idea why he died. In the autopsy report, we wrote brain haemorrhage resulting from an accident, but not one of us was satisfied with that assessment. The bleeding was so minor and located in an area that shouldn’t have affected anything else at all. And yet his liver, kidneys, heart and lungs shut down one after the other. The older I get, the more I think it’s like a game of roulette. I don’t believe we’ll ever figure out precisely how the brain works.” He tapped on the screen with a pen. “What do you intend to do?”

“I was hoping you would tell me.”

“Let’s hear your diagnosis.”

“Well, first of all, it seems to be a small-calibre bullet. It entered at the temple, and then stopped about four centimetres into the brain. It’s resting against the lateral ventricle. There’s bleeding there.”

“How will you proceed?”

“To use your terminology – get some forceps and extract the bullet by the same route it went in.”

“Excellent idea. I would use the thinnest forceps you have.”

“It’s that simple?”

“What else can we do in this case? We could leave the bullet where it is, and she might live to be a hundred, but it’s also a risk. She might develop epilepsy, migraines, all sorts of complaints. And one thing you really don’t want to do is drill into her skull and then operate a year from now when the wound itself has healed. The bullet is located away from the major blood vessels. So I would recommend that you extract it… but…”

“But what?”

“The bullet doesn’t worry me so much. She’s survived this far and that’s a good omen for her getting through having the bullet removed, too. The real problem is here.” He pointed at the screen. “Around the entry wound you have all sorts of bone fragments. I can see at least a dozen that are a couple of millimetres long. Some are embedded in the brain tissue. That’s what could kill her if you’re not careful.”

“Isn’t that part of the brain associated with numbers and mathematical capacity?” Jonasson said.

Ellis shrugged. “Mumbo jumbo. I have no idea what these particular grey cells are for. You can only do your best. You operate. I’ll look over your shoulder.”

Mikael Blomkvist looked up at the clock and saw that it was just after 3.00 in the morning. He was handcuffed and increasingly uncomfortable. He closed his eyes for a moment. He was dead tired but running on adrenaline. He opened them again and gave the policeman an angry glare. Inspector Thomas Paulsson had a shocked expression on his face. They were sitting at a kitchen table in a white farmhouse called Gosseberga, somewhere near Nossebro. Blomkvist had heard of the place for the first time less than twelve hours earlier.

There was no denying the disaster that had occurred.

“Imbecile,” Blomkvist said.

“Now, you listen here –”

“Imbecile,” Blomkvist said again. “I warned you he was dangerous, for Christ’s sake. I told you that you would have to handle him like a live grenade. He’s murdered at least three people with his bare hands and he’s built like a tank. And you send a couple of village policemen to arrest him as if he were some Saturday night drunk.”

Blomkvist shut his eyes again, wondering what else could go wrong that night.

He had found Salander just after midnight. She was very badly wounded. He had sent for the police and the Rescue Service.

The only thing that had gone right was that he had persuaded them to send a helicopter to take the girl to Sahlgrenska hospital. He had given them a clear description of her injuries and the bullet wound in her head, and some bright spark at the Rescue Service got the message.

Even so, it had taken over half an hour for the Puma from the helicopter unit in Säve to arrive at the farmhouse. Blomkvist had got two cars out of the barn. He switched on their headlights to illuminate a landing area in the field in front of the house.

The helicopter crew and two paramedics had proceeded in a routine and professional manner. One of the medics tended to Salander while the other took care of Alexander Zalachenko, known locally as Karl Axel Bodin. Zalachenko was Salander’s father and her worst enemy. He had tried to kill her, but he had failed. Blomkvist had found him in the woodshed at the farm with a nasty-looking gash – probably from an axe – in his face and some shattering damage to one of his legs which he did not trouble to investigate.

While he waited for the helicopter, he did what he could for Salander. He took a clean sheet from a linen cupboard and cut it up to make bandages. The blood had coagulated at the entry wound in her head, and he did not know whether he dared to put a bandage on it or not. In the end he fixed the fabric very loosely round her head, mostly so that the wound would not be exposed to bacteria or dirt. But he had stopped the bleeding from the wounds in her hip and shoulder in the simplest possible way. He had found a roll of duct tape and this he had used to close the wounds. The medics remarked that this, in their experience, was a brand-new form of bandage. He had also bathed Salander’s face with a wet towel and done his best to wipe off the dirt.

He had not gone back to the woodshed to tend to Zalachenko. He honestly did not give a damn about the man. But he did call Erika Berger on his mobile and told her the situation.

“Are you alright?” Berger asked him.

“I’m O.K.,” Blomkvist said. “Lisbeth is the one who’s in real danger.”

“That poor girl,” Berger said. “I read Björck’s Säpo report this evening. How should I deal with it?”

“I don’t have the energy to think that through right now,” Blomkvist said. Security Police matters were going to have to wait until the next day.

As he talked to Berger, he sat on the floor next to the bench and kept a watchful eye on Salander. He had taken off her shoes and her trousers so that he could bandage the wound to her hip, and now his hand rested on the trousers that he had dropped on the floor next to the bench. There was something in one of the pockets. He pulled out a Palm Tungsten T3.

He frowned and looked long and hard at the hand-held computer. When he heard the approaching helicopter he stuffed it into the inside pocket of his jacket and then went through all her other pockets. He found another set of keys to the apartment in Mosebacke and a passport in the name of Irene Nesser. He put these swiftly into a side pocket of his laptop case.

The first patrol car with Torstensson and Ingemarsson from the station in Trollhättan arrived a few minutes after the helicopter landed. Next to arrive was Inspector Paulsson, who took charge immediately. Blomkvist began to explain what had happened. He very soon realized that Paulsson was a pompous, rigid drill sergeant type. He did not seem to take in anything that Blomkvist said. It was when Paulsson arrived that things really started to go awry.

The only thing he seemed capable of grasping was that the badly damaged girl being cared for by the medics on the floor next to the kitchen bench was the triple murderer Lisbeth Salander. And above all it was important that he make the arrest. Three times Paulsson had asked the urgently occupied medical orderly whether the girl could be arrested on the spot. In the end the medic stood up and shouted at Paulsson to keep the bloody hell out of his way.

Paulsson had then turned his attention to the wounded man in the woodshed, and Blomkvist heard the inspector report over his radio that Salander had evidently attempted to kill yet another person.

By now Blomkvist was so infuriated with Paulsson, who had obviously not paid attention to a word he had said, that he yelled at him to call Inspector Bublanski in Stockholm without delay. Blomkvist had even taken out his mobile and offered to dial the number for him, but Paulsson was not interested.

Blomkvist then made two mistakes.

First, he patiently but firmly explained that the man who had committed the murders in Stockholm was Ronald Niedermann, who was built like a heavily armoured robot and suffered from a disease called congenital analgesia, and who at that moment was sitting in a ditch on the road to Nossebro tied to a traffic sign. Blomkvist told Paulsson exactly where Niedermann was to be found, and urged him to send a platoon armed with automatic weapons to pick him up. Paulsson finally asked how Niedermann had come to be in that ditch, and Blomkvist freely admitted that he himself had put him there, and had managed only by holding a gun on him the whole time.

“Assault with a deadly weapon,” was Paulsson’s immediate response.

At this point Blomkvist should have realized that Paulsson was dangerously stupid. He should have called Bublanski himself and asked him to intervene, to bring some clarity to the fog in which Paulsson was apparently enveloped. Instead he made his second mistake: he offered to hand over the weapon he had in his jacket pocket – the Colt.45 1911 Government model that he had found earlier that day at Salander’s apartment in Stockholm. It was the weapon he had used to disarm and disable Niedermann – not a straightforward matter with that giant of a man.

At which Paulsson swiftly arrested Blomkvist for possession of an illegal weapon. He then ordered his two officers, Torstensson and Ingemarsson, to drive over to the Nossebro road. They were to find out if there was any truth to Blomkvist’s story that a man was sitting in a ditch there, tied to a MOOSE CROSSING sign. If this was the case, the officers were to handcuff the person in question and bring him to the farm at Gosseberga.

Blomkvist had objected at once, pointing out that Niedermann was not a man who could be arrested and handcuffed just like that: he was a maniacal killer, for God’s sake. When Blomkvist’s objections were ignored by Paulsson, the exhaustion of the day made him reckless. He told Paulsson he was an incompetent fool and yelled at him that Torstensson and Ingemarsson should fucking forget about untying Niedermann until they had called for back-up. As a result of this outburst, he was handcuffed and pushed into the back seat of Paulsson’s car. Cursing, he watched as Torstensson and Ingemarsson drove off in their patrol car. The only glimmer of light in the darkness was that Salander had been carried to the helicopter, which was even now disappearing over the treetops in the direction of Göteborg. Blomkvist felt utterly helpless: he could only hope that she would be given the very best care. She was going to need it, or die.

Jonasson made two deep incisions all the way down to the cranium and peeled back the skin round the entry wound. He used clamps to secure the opening. A theatre nurse inserted a suction tube to remove any blood. Then came the awkward part, when he had to use a drill to enlarge the hole in the skull. The procedure was excruciatingly slow.

Finally he had a hole big enough to give access to Salander’s brain. With infinite care he inserted a probe into the brain and enlarged the wound channel by a few millimetres. Then he inserted a thinner probe and located the bullet. From the X-ray he could see that the bullet had turned and was lying at an angle of forty-five degrees to the entry channel. He used the probe cautiously to prise at the edge of the bullet, and after a few unsuccessful attempts he managed to lift it very slightly so that he could turn it in the right direction.

Finally he inserted narrow forceps with serrated jaws. He gripped the base of the bullet, got a good hold on it, then pulled the forceps straight out. The bullet emerged with almost no resistance. He held it up to the light for a few seconds and saw that it appeared intact; then he dropped it into a bowl.

“Swab,” he said, and his request was instantly met.

He glanced at the E.C.G., which showed that his patient still had regular heart activity.

“Forceps.”

He pulled down the powerful magnifying glass hanging overhead and focused on the exposed area.

“Careful,” Ellis said.

Over the next forty-five minutes Jonasson picked out no fewer than thirty-two tiny bone chips from round the entry wound. The smallest of these chips could scarcely be seen with the naked eye.

As Blomkvist tried in frustration to manoeuvre his mobile out of the breast pocket of his jacket – it proved to be an impossible task with his hands cuffed behind his back, nor was it clear to him how he was going to be able to use it – several more vehicles containing both uniformed officers and technical personnel arrived at the Gosseberga farm. They were detailed by Paulsson to secure forensic evidence in the woodshed and to do a thorough examination of the farmhouse, from which several weapons had already been confiscated. By now resigned to his futility, Blomkvist had observed their comings and goings from his vantage point in Paulsson’s vehicle.

An hour passed before it dawned on Paulsson that Torstensson and Ingemarsson had not yet returned from their mission to retrieve Niedermann. He had Blomkvist brought into the kitchen, where he was required once more to provide precise directions to the spot.

Blomkvist closed his eyes.

He was still in the kitchen with Paulsson when the armed response team sent to relieve Torstensson and Ingemarsson reported back. Ingemarsson had been found dead with a broken neck. Torstensson was still alive, but he had been savagely beaten. The men had been discovered near a MOOSE CROSSING sign by the side of the road. Their service weapons and the marked police car were gone.

Inspector Paulsson had started out with a relatively manageable situation: now he had a murdered policeman and an armed killer on the run.

“Imbecile,” Blomkvist said again.

“It won’t help to insult the police.”

“That certainly seems to be true in your case. But I’m going to report you for dereliction of duty and you won’t even know what hit you. Before I’m through with you, you’re going to be celebrated as the dumbest policeman in Sweden on every newspaper billboard in the country.”

The notion of being the object of public ridicule appeared at last to have an effect on Inspector Paulsson. His face was lined with anxiety.

“What do you propose?”

“I don’t propose, I demand that you call Inspector Bublanski in Stockholm. This minute. His number’s on my mobile in my breast pocket.”

Inspector Modig woke with a start when her mobile rang at the other end of the bedroom. She saw to her dismay that it was just after 4.00 in the morning. Then she looked at her husband, who was snoring peacefully. He would probably sleep through an artillery barrage. She staggered out of bed, unplugged her mobile from the charger, and fumbled for the talk button.

Jan Bublanski, she thought. Who else?

“Everything has gone to hell down in Trollhättan,” her senior officer said without bothering to greet her or apologize. “The X2000 to Göteborg leaves at 5.10. Take a taxi.”

“What’s happened?”

“Blomkvist found Salander, Niedermann and Zalachenko. Got himself arrested for insulting a police officer, resisting arrest, and for possession of an illegal weapon. Salander was taken to Sahlgrenska with a bullet in her head. Zalachenko is there too with an axe wound to his skull. Niedermann got away. And he killed a policeman tonight.”

Modig blinked twice, registering how exhausted she felt. Most of all she wanted to crawl back into bed and take a month’s holiday.

“The X2000 at 5.10. O.K. What do you want me to do?”

“Meet Jerker Holmberg at Central Station. You’re to contact an Inspector Thomas Paulsson at the Trollhättan police. He seems to be responsible for much of the mess tonight. Blomkvist described him as an Olympic-class idiot.”

“You’ve talked to Blomkvist?”

“Apparently he’s been arrested and cuffed. I managed to persuade Paulsson to let me talk to him for a moment. I’m on my way to Kungsholmen right now, and I’ll try to work out what’s going on. We’ll keep in touch by mobile.”

Modig looked at the time again. Then she called a taxi and jumped into the shower for a minute. She brushed her teeth, pulled a comb through her hair, and put on long black trousers, a black T-shirt, and a grey jacket. She put her police revolver in her shoulder bag and picked out a dark-red leather coat. Then she shook enough life into her husband to explain where she was off to, and that he had to deal with the kids in the morning. She walked out of the front door just as the taxi drew up.

She did not have to search for her colleague, Criminal Inspector Holmberg. She assumed that he would be in the restaurant car and that is where she found him. He had already bought coffee and sandwiches for her. They sat in silence for five minutes as they ate their breakfast. Finally Holmberg pushed his coffee cup aside.

“Maybe I should get some training in some other field,” he said.

Some time after 4.00 in the morning, Criminal Inspector Marcus Erlander from the Violent Crimes Division of the Göteborg police arrived in Gosseberga and took over the investigation from the overburdened Paulsson. Erlander was a short, round man in his fifties with grey hair. One of the first things he did was to have Blomkvist released from his handcuffs, and then he produced rolls and coffee from a thermos. They sat in the living room for a private conversation.

“I’ve spoken with Bublanski,” Erlander said. “Bubble and I have known each other for many years. We are both of us sorry that you were subjected to Paulsson’s rather primitive way of operating.”

“He succeeded in getting a policeman killed tonight,” Blomkvist said.

Erlander said: “I knew Officer Ingemarsson personally. He served in Göteborg before he moved to Trollhättan. He has a three-year-old daughter.”

“I’m sorry. I tried to warn him.”

“So I heard. You were quite emphatic, it seems, and that’s why you were cuffed. You were the one who exposed Wennerström last year. Bublanski says that you’re a shameless journalist bastard and an insane private investigator, but that you just might know what you’re talking about. Can you bring me up to speed so that I can get the hang of what’s going on?”

“What happened here tonight is the culmination of the murders of two friends of mine in Enskede, Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson. And the murder of a person who was no friend of mine… a lawyer called Bjurman, also Lisbeth Salander’s guardian.”

Erlander made notes between taking sips of his coffee.

“As you no doubt know, the police have been looking for Salander since Easter. She was a suspect in all three murders. First of all, you have to realize that Salander is not only not guilty of these murders, she has been throughout a victim in the whole affair.”

“I haven’t had the least connection to the Enskede business, but after everything that was in the media about her it seems a bit hard to swallow that Salander could be completely innocent.”

“Nonetheless, that’s how it is. She’s innocent. Full stop. The killer is Ronald Niedermann, the man who murdered your officer tonight. He works for Karl Axel Bodin.”

“The Bodin who’s in Sahlgrenska with an axe in his skull?”

“The axe isn’t still in his head. I assume it was Salander who nailed him. His real name is Alexander Zalachenko and he’s Lisbeth’s father. He was a hit man for Russian military intelligence. He defected in the ’70s, and was then on the books of Säpo until the collapse of the Soviet Union. He’s been running his own criminal network ever since.”

Erlander scrutinized the man opposite him. Blomkvist’s face was shiny with sweat, but he looked both frozen and deathly tired. Until now he had sounded perfectly rational, but Paulsson – whose opinion had little influence on Erlander – had warned him that Blomkvist had been babbling on about Russian agents and German hit men – hardly routine elements in Swedish police work. Blomkvist had apparently reached the point in his story at which Paulsson had decided to ignore everything else he might say. But there was one policeman dead and another severely wounded on the road to Nossebro, so Erlander was willing to listen. But he could not keep a trace of incredulity out of his voice.

“O.K. A Russian agent.”

Blomkvist smiled weakly, only too aware of how odd his story sounded.

“A former Russian agent. I can document every one of my claims.”

“Go on.”

“Zalachenko was a top spy in the ’70s. He defected and was granted asylum by Säpo. In his old age he became a gangster. As far as I understand it, it’s not a unique situation in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse.”

“O.K.”

“As I said, I don’t know exactly what happened here tonight, but Lisbeth tracked down her father whom she hadn’t seen for fifteen years. Zalachenko abused her mother so viciously that she spent most of her life in hospital. He tried to murder Lisbeth, and through Niedermann he was the architect of the murders of Svensson and Johansson. Plus, he was behind the kidnapping of Salander’s friend Miriam Wu – you probably heard of Paolo Roberto’s title bout in Nykvarn, as a result of which Wu was rescued from certain death.”

“If Salander hit her father in the head with an axe she isn’t exactly innocent.”

“She has been shot three times. I think we could assume her actions were on some level self-defence. I wonder…”

“Yes?”

“She was so covered with dirt, with mud, that her hair was one big lump of dried clay. Her clothes were full of sand, inside and out. It looked as though she might have been buried during the night. Niedermann is known to have a habit of burying people. The police in Södertälje have found two graves in the place that’s owned by Svavelsjö Motorcycle Club, outside Nykvarn.”

“Three, as a matter of fact. They found one more late last night. But if Salander was shot and buried, how was she able to climb out and start wandering around with an axe?”

“Whatever went on here tonight, you have to understand that Salander is exceptionally resourceful. I tried to persuade Paulsson to bring in a dog unit –”

“It’s on its way now.”

“Good.”

“Paulsson arrested you for insulting a police officer…”

“I will dispute that. I called him an imbecile and an incompetent fool. Under the circumstances neither of these epithets could be considered wide of the mark.”

“Hmm. It’s not a wholly inaccurate description. But you were also arrested for possession of an illegal weapon.”

“I made the mistake of trying to hand over a weapon to him. I don’t want to say anything more about that until I talk to my lawyer.”

“Alright. We’ll leave it at that. We have more serious issues to discuss. What do you know about this Niedermann?”

“He’s a murderer. And there’s something wrong with him. He’s over two metres tall and built like a tank. Ask Paolo Roberto, who boxed with him. He suffers from a disease called congenital analgesia, which means the transmitter substance in his nerve synapses doesn’t function. He feels no pain. He’s German, was born in Hamburg, and in his teens he was a skinhead. Right now he’s on the run and he’ll be seriously dangerous to anyone he runs into.”

“Do you have an idea where he might be heading?”

“No. I only know that I had him neatly trussed, all ready to be arrested, when that idiot from Trollhättan took charge of the situation.”

Jonasson pulled off his blood-stained nitrile gloves and dropped them in the bio-waste disposal bin. A theatre nurse was applying bandages to the gunshot wound on Salander’s hip. The operation had lasted three hours. He looked at the girl’s shaved and wounded head, which was already wrapped in bandages.

He felt a sudden tenderness, as he often did for patients after an operation. According to the newspapers, she was a psychopathic mass murderer, but to him she looked more like an injured sparrow.

“You’re an excellent surgeon,” Ellis said, looking at him with amused affection.

“Can I buy you breakfast?”

“Can one get pancakes and jam anywhere round here?”

“Waffles,” Jonasson said. “At my house. Let me call my wife to warn her, then we can take a taxi.” He stopped and looked at the clock. “On second thoughts, it might be better if we didn’t call.”

Annika Giannini woke with a start. She saw that it was 5.58 a.m… She had her first client meeting at 8.00. She turned to look at Enrico, who was sleeping peacefully and probably would not be awake before 8.00. She blinked hard a few times and got up to turn on the coffeemaker before she took her shower. She dressed in black trousers, a white polo neck, and a muted brick-red jacket. She made two slices of toast with cheese, orange marmalade and a sliced avocado, and carried her breakfast into the living room in time for the 6.30 television news. She took a sip of coffee and had just opened her mouth to take a bite of toast when she heard the headlines.

One policeman killed and another seriously wounded. Drama last night as triple murderer Lisbeth Salander is finally captured.

At first she could not make any sense of it. Was it Salander who had killed a policeman? The news item was sketchy, but bit by bit she gathered that a man was being sought for the killing. A nationwide alert had gone out for a man in his mid-thirties, as yet unnamed. Salander herself was critically injured and at Sahlgrenska hospital in Göteborg.

She switched to the other channel, but she learned nothing more about what had happened. She reached for her mobile and called her brother, Mikael Blomkvist. She only got his voicemail. She felt a small twinge of fear. He had called on his way to Göteborg. He had been tracking Salander. And a murderer who called himself Ronald Niedermann.

As it was growing light an observant police officer found traces of blood on the ground behind the woodshed. A police dog followed the trail to a narrow trench in a clearing in a wood about four hundred metres north-east of the farmhouse.

Blomkvist went with Inspector Erlander. Grimly they studied the site. Much more blood had obviously been shed in and around the trench.

They found a damaged cigarette case that seemed to have been used as a scoop. Erlander put it in an evidence bag and labelled the find. He also gathered samples of blood-soaked clumps of dirt. A uniformed officer drew his attention to a cigarette butt – a filterless Pall Mall – some distance from the hole. This too was saved in an evidence bag and labelled. Blomkvist remembered having seen a pack of Pall Malls on the kitchen counter in Zalachenko’s house.

Erlander glanced up at the lowering rain clouds. The storm that had ravaged Göteborg earlier in the night had obviously passed to the south of the Nossebro area, but it was only a matter of time before the rain came. He instructed one of his men to get a tarpaulin to cover the trench and its immediate surroundings.

“I think you’re right,” Erlander said to Blomkvist as they walked back to the farmhouse. “An analysis of the blood will probably establish that Salander was buried here, and I’m beginning to expect that we’ll find her fingerprints on the cigarette case. She was shot and buried here, but somehow she managed to survive and dig herself out and –”

“And somehow got back to the farm and swung an axe into Zalachenko’s skull,” Blomkvist finished for him. “She can be a moody bitch.”

“But how on earth did she handle Niedermann?”

Blomkvist shrugged. He was as bewildered as Erlander on that score.

CHAPTER 2

Modig and Holmberg arrived at Göteborg Central Station just after 8.00 a.m. Bublanski had called to give them new instructions. They could forget about finding a car to take them to Gosseberga. They were to take a taxi to police headquarters on Ernst Fontells Plats, the seat of the County Criminal Police in Western Götaland. They waited for almost an hour before Inspector Erlander arrived from Gosseberga with Blomkvist. Blomkvist said hello to Modig, having met her before, and shook hands with Holmberg, whom he did not know. One of Erlander’s colleagues joined them with an update on the hunt for Niedermann. It was a brief report.

“We have a team working under the auspices of the County Criminal Police. An A.P.B. has gone out, of course. The missing patrol car was found in Alingsås early this morning. The trail ends there for the moment. We have to suppose that he switched vehicles, but we’ve had no report of a car being stolen thereabouts.”

“Media?” Modig asked, with an apologetic glance at Blomkvist.

“It’s a police killing and the press is out in force. We’ll be holding a press conference at 10.00.”

“Does anyone have any information on Lisbeth Salander’s condition?” Blomkvist said. He felt strangely uninterested in everything to do with the hunt for Niedermann.

“She was operated on during the night. They removed a bullet from her head. She hasn’t regained consciousness yet.”

“Is there any prognosis?”

“As I understand it, we won’t know anything until she wakes up. But the surgeon says he has high hopes that she’ll survive, barring unforeseen complications.”

“And Zalachenko?”

“Who?” Erlander’s colleague said. He had not yet been brought up to date with all the details.

“Karl Axel Bodin.”

“I see… yes, he was operated on last night too. He had a very deep gash across his face and another just below one kneecap. He’s in bad shape, but the injuries aren’t life-threatening.”

Blomkvist absorbed this news.

“You look tired,” Modig said.

“You got that right. I’m into my third day with hardly any sleep.”

“Believe it or not, he actually slept in the car coming down from Nossebro,” Erlander said.

“Could you manage to tell us the whole story from the beginning?” Holmberg said. “It feels to us as though the score between the private investigators and the police investigators is about 3–0.”

Blomkvist gave him a wan smile. “That’s a line I’d like to hear from Officer Bubble.”

They made their way to the police canteen to have breakfast. Blomkvist spent half an hour explaining step by step how he had pieced together the story of Zalachenko. When he had finished, the detectives sat in silence.

“There are a few holes in your account,” Holmberg said at last.

“That’s possible,” Blomkvist said.

“You didn’t say, for example, how you came to be in possession of the Top Secret Säpo report on Zalachenko.”

“I found it yesterday at Lisbeth Salander’s apartment when I finally worked out where she was. She probably found it in Bjurman’s summer cabin.”

“So you’ve discovered Salander’s hideout?” Modig said.

Blomkvist nodded.

“And?”

“You’ll have to find out for yourselves where it is. Salander put a lot of effort into establishing a secret address for herself, and I have no intention of revealing its whereabouts.”

Modig and Holmberg exchanged an anxious look.

“Mikael… this is a murder investigation,” Modig said.

“You still haven’t got it, have you? Lisbeth Salander is in fact innocent and the police have violated her and destroyed her reputation in ways that beggar belief. ‘Lesbian Satanist gang’… where the hell do you get this stuff? Not to mention her being sought in connection with three murders she had nothing to do with. If she wants to tell you where she lives, then I’m sure she will.”

“But there’s another gap I don’t really understand,” Holmberg said. “How does Bjurman come into the story in the first place? You say he was the one who started the whole thing by contacting Zalachenko and asking him to kill Salander. Why would he do that?”

“I reckon he hired Zalachenko to get rid of Salander. The plan was for her to end up in that warehouse in Nykvarn.”

“He was her guardian. What motive would he have had to get rid of her?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I can do complicated.”

“He had a hell of a good motive. He had done something that Salander knew about. She was a threat to his entire future and well-being.”

“What had he done?”

“I think it would be best if you gave Salander a chance to explain the story herself.” He looked Holmberg steadily in the eye.

“Let me guess,” Modig said. “Bjurman subjected his ward to some sort of sexual assault…”

Blomkvist shrugged and said nothing.

“You don’t know about the tattoo Bjurman had on his abdomen?”

“What tattoo?” Blomkvist was taken aback.

“An amateurish tattoo across his belly with a message that said: I am a sadistic pig, a pervert and a rapist. We’ve been wondering what that was about.”

Blomkvist burst out laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’ve always wondered what she did to get her revenge. But listen… I don’t want to discuss this for the same reason I’ve already given. She’s the real victim here. She’s the one who has to decide what she is willing to tell you. Sorry.”

He looked almost apologetic.

“Rapes should always be reported to the police,” Modig said.

“I’m with you on that. But this rape took place two years ago, and Lisbeth still hasn’t talked to the police about it. Which means that she doesn’t intend to. It doesn’t matter how much I disagree with her about the matter; it’s her decision. Anyway…”

“Yes?”

“She had no good reason to trust the police. The last time she tried explaining what a pig Zalachenko was, she was locked up in a mental hospital.”

Richard Ekström, the leader of the preliminary investigation, had butterflies in his stomach as he asked his team leader Inspector Bublanski to take a seat opposite him. Ekström straightened his glasses and stroked his well-groomed goatee. He felt that the situation was chaotic and ominous. For several weeks they had been hunting Lisbeth Salander. He himself had proclaimed her far and wide to be mentally imbalanced, a dangerous psychopath. He had leaked information that would have backed him up in an upcoming trial. Everything had looked so good.

There had been no doubt in his mind that Salander was guilty of three murders. The trial should have been a straightforward matter, a pure media circus with himself at centre stage. Then everything had gone haywire, and he found himself with a completely different murderer and a chaos that seemed to have no end in sight. That bitch Salander.

“Well, this is a fine mess we’ve landed in,” he said. “What have you come up with this morning?”

“A nationwide A.P.B. has been sent out on this Ronald Niedermann, but there’s no sign of him. At present he’s being sought only for the murder of Officer Gunnar Ingemarsson, but I anticipate we’ll have grounds for charging him with the three murders here in Stockholm. Maybe you should call a press conference.”

Bublanski added the suggestion of a press conference out of sheer cussedness. Ekström hated press conferences.

“I think we’ll hold off on the press conference for the time being,” he snapped.

Bublanski had to stop himself from smiling.

“In the first instance, this is a matter for the Göteborg police,” Ekström said.

“Well, we do have Modig and Holmberg on the scene in Göteborg, and we’ve begun to co-operate –”

“We’ll hold off on the press conference until we know more,” Ekström repeated in a brittle tone. “What I want to know is: how certain are you that Niedermann really is involved in the murders in Stockholm?”

“My gut feeling? I’m 100 per cent convinced. On the other hand, the case isn’t exactly rock solid. We have no witnesses to the murders, and there is no satisfactory forensic evidence. Lundin and Nieminen of the Svavelsjö M.C. are refusing to say anything – they’re claiming they’ve never heard of Niedermann. But he’s going to go to prison for the murder of Officer Ingemarsson.”

“Precisely,” said Ekström. “The killing of the police officer is the main thing right now. But tell me this: is there anything at all to even suggest that Salander might be involved in some way in the murders? Could she and Niedermann have somehow committed the murders together?”

“I very much doubt it, and if I were you I wouldn’t voice that theory in public.”

“So how is she involved?”

“This is an intricate story, as Mikael Blomkvist claimed from the very beginning. It revolves around this Zala… Alexander Zalachenko.”

Ekström flinched at the mention of the name Blomkvist.

“Go on,” he said.

“Zala is a Russian hit man – apparently without a grain of conscience – who defected in the ’70s, and Lisbeth Salander was unlucky enough to have him as her father. He was sponsored or supported by a faction within Säpo that tidied up after any crimes he committed. A police officer attached to Säpo also saw to it that Salander was locked up in a children’s psychiatric clinic. She was twelve and had threatened to blow Zalachenko’s identity, his alias, his whole cover.”

“This is a bit difficult to digest. It’s hardly a story we can make public. If I understand the matter correctly, all this stuff about Zalachenko is highly classified.”

“Nevertheless, it’s the truth. I have documentation.”

“Could I see it?”

Bublanski pushed across the desk a folder containing a police report dated 1991. Ekström surreptitiously scanned the stamp, which indicated that the document was Top Secret, and the registration number, which he at once identified as belonging to the Security Police. He leafed rapidly through the hundred or so pages, reading paragraphs here and there. Eventually he put the folder aside.

“We have to try to tone this down, so that the situation doesn’t get completely out of our control. So Salander was locked up in an asylum because she tried to kill her father… this Zalachenko. And now she has attacked him with an axe. By any interpretation that would be attempted murder. And she has to be charged with shooting Magge Lundin in Stallarholmen.”

“You can arrest whoever you want, but I would tread carefully if I were you.”

“There’s going to be an almighty scandal if Säpo’s involvement gets leaked.”

Bublanski shrugged. His job was to investigate crimes, not to clean up after scandals.

“This bastard from Säpo, this Gunnar Björck. What do you know about his role?”

“He’s one of the major players. He’s on sick leave for a slipped disc and lives in Smådalarö at present.”

“O.K… we’ll keep the lid on Säpo’s involvement for the time being. The focus right now is to be on the murder of a police officer.”

“It’s going to be hard to keep this under wraps.”

“What do you mean?”

“I sent Andersson to bring in Björck for a formal interrogation. That should be happening…” – Bublanski looked at his watch – “… yes, about now.”

“You what?”

“I was rather hoping to have the pleasure of driving out to Smådalarö myself, but the events surrounding last night’s killing took precedence.”

“I didn’t give anyone permission to arrest Björck.”

“That’s true. But it’s not an arrest. I’m just bringing him in for questioning.”

“Whichever, I don’t like it.”

Bublanski leaned forward, almost as if to confide in the other man.

“Richard… this is how it is. Salander has been subjected to a number of infringements of her rights, starting when she was a child. I do not mean for this to continue on my watch. You have the option to remove me as leader of the investigation… but if you did that I would be forced to write a harsh memo about the matter.”

Ekström looked as if he had just swallowed something very sour.

Gunnar Björck, on sick leave from his job as assistant chief of the Immigration Division of the Security Police, opened the door of his summer house in Smådalarö and looked up at a powerfully built, blond man with a crewcut who wore a black leather jacket.

“I’m looking for Gunnar Björck.”

“That’s me.”

“Curt Andersson, County Criminal Police.” The man held up his I.D.

“Yes?”

“You are requested to accompany me to Kungsholmen to assist the police in their investigations into the case involving Lisbeth Salander.”

“Uh… there must be some sort of misunderstanding.”

“There’s no misunderstanding,” Andersson said.

“You don’t understand. I’m a police officer myself. Save yourself making a big mistake: check it out with your superior officers.”

“My superior is the one who wants to talk to you.”

“I have to make a call and –”

“You can make your call from Kungsholmen.”

Björck felt suddenly resigned. It’s happened. I’m going to be arrested. That goddamn fucking Blomkvist. And fucking Salander.

“Am I being arrested?” he said.

“Not for the moment. But we can arrange for that if you like.”

“No… no, of course I’ll come with you. Naturally I’d want to assist my colleagues in the police force.”

“Alright, then,” Andersson said, walking into the hallway to keep a close eye on Björck as he turned off the coffee machine and picked up his coat.

In the late morning it dawned on Blomkvist that his rental car was still at the Gosseberga farm, but he was so exhausted that he did not have the strength or the means to get out there to fetch it, much less drive safely for any distance. Erlander kindly arranged for a crime scene tech to take the car back on his way home.

“Think of it as compensation for the way you were treated last night.”

Blomkvist thanked him and took a taxi to City Hotel on Lorensbergsgatan. He booked in for the night for 800 kronor and went straight to his room and undressed. He sat naked on the bed and took Salander’s Palm Tungsten T3 from the inside pocket of his jacket, weighing it in his hand. He was still amazed that it had not been confiscated when Paulsson frisked him, but Paulsson presumably thought it was Blomkvist’s own, and he had never been formally taken into custody and searched. He thought for a moment and then slipped it into a compartment of his laptop case where he had also put Salander’s D.V.D. marked “Bjurman,” which Paulsson had also missed. He knew that technically he was withholding evidence, but these were the things that Salander would no doubt prefer not to have fall into the wrong hands.

He turned on his mobile and saw that the battery was low, so he plugged in the charger. He made a call to his sister, Advokat Giannini.

“Hi, Annika.”

“What did you have to do with the policeman’s murder last night?” she asked him at once.

He told her succinctly what had happened.

“O.K., so Salander is in intensive care.”

“Correct, and we won’t know the extent or severity of her injuries until she regains consciousness, but now she’s really going to need a lawyer.”

Giannini thought for a moment. “Do you think she’d want me for her lawyer?”

“Probably she wouldn’t want any lawyer at all. She isn’t the type to ask anyone for help.”

“Mikael… I’ve said this before, it sounds like she might need a criminal lawyer. Let me look at the documentation you have.”

“Talk to Erika and ask her for a copy.”

As soon as Blomkvist disconnected, he called Berger himself. She did not answer her mobile, so he tried her number at the Millennium offices. Henry Cortez answered.

“Erika’s out somewhere,” he said.

Blomkvist briefly explained what had happened and asked Cortez to pass the information to Millennium’s editor-in-chief.

“Will do. What do you want us to do?” Cortez said.

“Nothing today,” Blomkvist said. “I have to get some sleep. I’ll be back in Stockholm tomorrow if nothing else comes up. Millennium will have an opportunity to present its version of the story in the next issue, but that’s almost a month away.”

He flipped his mobile shut and crawled into bed. He was asleep within thirty seconds.

Assistant County Police Chief Carina Spångberg tapped her pen against her glass of water and asked for quiet. Nine people were seated around the conference table in her office at police headquarters. Three women and six men: the head of the Violent Crimes Division and his assistant head; three criminal inspectors including Erlander and the Göteborg police press officers; preliminary investigation leader Agneta Jervas from the prosecutor’s office, and lastly Inspectors Modig and Holmberg from the Stockholm police. They were included as a sign of goodwill and to demonstrate that Göteborg wished to co-operate with their colleagues from the capital. Possibly also to show them how a real police investigation should be run.

Spångberg, who was frequently the lone woman in a male landscape, had a reputation for not wasting time on formalities or mere courtesies. She explained that the county police chief was at the Europol conference in Madrid, that he had broken off his trip as soon as he knew that one of his police officers had been murdered, but that he was not expected back before late that night. Then she turned directly to the head of the Violent Crimes Division, Anders Pehrzon, and asked him to brief the assembled company.

“It’s been about ten hours since our colleague was murdered on Nossebrovägen. We know the name of the killer, Ronald Niedermann, but we still don’t have a picture of him.”

“In Stockholm we have a photograph of him that’s about twenty years old. Paolo Roberto got it through a boxing club in Germany, but it’s almost unusable,” Holmberg said.

“Alright. The patrol car that Niedermann is thought to have driven away was found in Alingsås this morning, as you all know. It was parked on a side street 350 metres from the railway station. We haven’t had a report yet of any car thefts in the area this morning.”

“What’s the status of the search?”

“We’re keeping an eye on all trains arriving in Stockholm and Malmö. There is a nationwide A.P.B. out and we’ve alerted the police in Norway and Denmark. Right now we have about thirty officers working directly on the investigation, and of course the whole force is keeping their eyes peeled.”

“No leads?”

“No, nothing yet. But someone with Niedermann’s distinctive appearance is not going to go unnoticed for long.”

“Does anyone know about Torstensson’s condition?” asked one of the inspectors from Violent Crime.

“He’s at Sahlgrenska. His injuries seem to be similar to those of a car crash victim – it’s hardly credible that anyone could do such damage with his bare hands: a broken leg, ribs crushed, cervical vertebrae injured, plus there’s a risk that he may be paralysed.”

They all took stock of their colleague’s plight for a few moments until Spångberg turned to Erlander.

“Marcus… tell us what really happened at Gosseberga.”

“Thomas Paulsson happened at Gosseberga.”

A ripple of groans greeted this response.

“Can’t someone give that man early retirement? He’s a walking catastrophe.”

“I know all about Paulsson,” Spångberg interrupted. “But I haven’t heard any complaints about him in the last… well, not for the past two years. In what way has he become harder to handle?”

“The police chief up there is an old friend of Paulsson’s, and he’s probably been trying to protect him. With all good intentions, of course, and I don’t mean to criticize him. But last night Paulsson’s behaviour was so bizarre that several of his people mentioned it to me.”

“In what way bizarre?”

Erlander glanced at Modig and Holmberg. He was embarrassed to be discussing flaws in their organization in front of the visitors from Stockholm.

“As far as I’m concerned, the strangest thing was that he detailed one of the techs to make an inventory of everything in the woodshed – where we found the Zalachenko guy?”

“An inventory of what in the woodshed?” Spångberg wanted to know.

“Yes… well… he said he needed to know exactly how many pieces of wood were in there. So that the report would be accurate.”

There was a charged silence around the conference table before Erlander went on.

“And this morning it came out that Paulsson has been taking at least two different antidepressants. He should have been on sick leave, but no-one knew about his condition.”

“What condition?” Spångberg said sharply.

“Well, obviously I don’t know what’s wrong with him – patient’s confidentiality and all that – but the drugs he’s taking are strong ataractics on the one hand, and stimulants. He was high as a kite all night.”

“Good God,” said Spångberg emphatically. She looked like the thundercloud that had swept over Göteborg that morning. “I want Paulsson in here for a chat. Right now.”

“He collapsed this morning and was admitted to the hospital suffering from exhaustion. It was just our bad luck that he happened to be on rotation.”

“May I ask… Paulsson, did he arrest Mikael Blomkvist last night?”

“He wrote a report citing offensive behaviour, aggressive resistance to police officers, and illegal possession of a weapon. That’s what he put in the report.”

“What does Blomkvist say?”

“He concedes that he was insulting, but he claims it was in self-defence. He says that the resistance consisted of a forceful verbal attempt to prevent Torstensson and Ingemarsson from going to pick up Niedermann alone, without back-up.”

“Witnesses?”

“Well, there is Torstensson. I don’t believe Paulsson’s claim of aggressive resistance for a minute. It’s a typical pre-emptive retaliation to undermine potential complaints from Blomkvist.”

“But Blomkvist managed to overpower Niedermann all by himself, did he not?” Prosecutor Jervas said.

“By holding a gun to him.”

“So Blomkvist had a gun. Then there was some basis for his arrest after all. Where did he get the weapon?”

“Blomkvist won’t discuss it without his lawyer being there. And Paulsson arrested Blomkvist when he was trying to hand in the weapon to the police.”

“Could I make a small, informal suggestion?” Modig said cautiously.

Everyone turned to her.

“I have met Mikael Blomkvist on several occasions in the course of this investigation. I have found him quite likeable, even though he is a journalist. I suppose you’re the one who has to make the decision about charging him…” She looked at Jervas, who nodded. “All this stuff about insults and aggressive resistance is just nonsense. I assume you will ignore it.”

“Probably. Illegal weapons are more serious.”

“I would urge you to wait and see. Blomkvist has put the pieces of this puzzle together all by himself; he’s way ahead of us on the police force. It will be to our advantage to stay on good terms with him and ensure his co-operation, rather than unleash him to condemn the entire police force in his magazine and elsewhere in the media.”

After a few seconds, Erlander cleared his throat. If Modig dared to stick her neck out, he could do the same.

“I agree with Sonja. I too think Blomkvist is a man we could work with. I’ve apologized to him for the way he was treated last night. He seems ready to let bygones be bygones. Besides, he has integrity. He somehow tracked down where Salander was living but he won’t give us the address. He’s not afraid to get into a public scrap with the police… and he’s most certainly in a position where his voice will carry just as much weight in the media as any report from Paulsson.”

“But he refuses to give the police any information about Salander.”

“He says that we’ll have to ask her ourselves, if that time ever comes. He says he absolutely won’t discuss a person who is not only innocent but who also has had her rights so severely violated.”

“What kind of weapon is it?” Jervas said.

“It’s a Colt 1911 Government. Serial number unknown. Forensics have it, and we don’t know yet whether it is connected to any known crime in Sweden. If it is, that will put the matter in a rather different light.”

Spångberg raised her pen.

“Agneta… it’s up to you to decide whether you want to initiate a preliminary investigation against Blomkvist. But I advise that you wait for the report from forensics. So let’s move on. This character Zalachenko… what can our colleagues from Stockholm tell us about him?”

“The truth is,” Modig said, “that until yesterday afternoon we had never heard of either Zalachenko or Niedermann.”

“I thought you were busy looking for a lesbian Satanist gang in Stockholm. Was I wrong?” one of the Göteborg policemen said. His colleagues all frowned. Holmberg was studying his fingernails. Modig had to take the question.

“Within these four walls, I can tell you that we have our equivalent of Inspector Paulsson, and all that stuff about a lesbian Satanist gang is probably a smokescreen originating mainly from him.”

Modig and Holmberg then described in detail the investigation as it had developed. When they had finished there was a long silence around the table.

“If all this about Gunnar Björck is true and it comes out, Säpo’s ears are going to be burning,” the assistant chief of the Violent Crimes Division concluded.

Jervas raised her hand. “It sounds to me as though your suspicions are for the most part based on assumptions and circumstantial evidence. As a prosecutor I would be uneasy about the lack of unassailable evidence.”

“We’re aware of that,” Holmberg said. “We think we know what happened in broad outline, but there are questions that still have to be answered.”

“I gather you’re still busy with excavations in Nykvarn,” Spångberg said. “How many killings do you reckon this case involves?”

Holmberg rubbed his eyes wearily. “We started with two, then three murders in Stockholm. Those are the ones that prompted the hunt for Salander: the deaths of Advokat Bjurman, the journalist Dag Svensson, and Mia Johansson, an academic. In the area around the warehouse in Nykvarn we have so far found three graves, well, three bodies. We’ve identified a known dealer and petty thief who was found dismembered in one trench. We found a woman’s body in a second trench – she’s still unidentified. And we haven’t dug up the third yet. It appears to be older than the others. Furthermore, Blomkvist has made a connection to the murder several months ago of a prostitute in Södertälje.”

“So, with Gunnar Ingemarsson dead in Gosseberga, we’re talking about at least eight murders. That’s a horrendous statistic. Do we suspect this Niedermann of all of them? If so, he has to be treated as a madman, a mass murderer.”

Modig and Holmberg exchanged glances. It was now a matter of how far they wanted to align themselves with such assertions. Finally Modig spoke up.

“Even though crucial evidence is lacking, my superior, Inspector Bublanski, and I are tending towards the belief that Blomkvist is correct in claiming that the first three murders were committed by Niedermann. That would require us to believe that Salander is innocent. With respect to the graves in Nykvarn, Niedermann is linked to the site through the kidnapping of Salander’s friend Miriam Wu. There is a strong likelihood that she too would have been his victim. But the warehouse is owned by a relative of the president of Svavelsjö Motorcycle Club, and until we’re able to identify the remains, we won’t be able to draw any conclusions.”

“That petty thief you identified…”

“Kenneth Gustafsson, forty-four, dealer, and delinquent in his youth. Offhand I would guess it’s to do with an internal shake-up of some sort. Svavelsjö M.C. is mixed up in several kinds of criminal activity, including the distribution of methamphetamine. Nykvarn may be a cemetery in the woods for people who crossed them, but…”

“Yes?”

“This young prostitute who was murdered in Södertälje… her name is Irina Petrova. The autopsy revealed that she died as a result of a staggeringly vicious assault. She looked as if she had been beaten to death. But the actual cause of her injuries could not be established. Blomkvist made a pretty acute observation. Petrova had injuries that could very well have been inflicted by a man’s bare hands…”

“Niedermann?”

“It’s a reasonable assumption. But there’s no proof yet.”

“So how do we proceed?” Spångberg wondered.

“I have to confer with Bublanski,” Modig said. “But a logical step would be to interrogate Zalachenko. We’re interested in hearing what he has to say about the murders in Stockholm, and for you it’s a matter of finding out what was Niedermann’s role in Zalachenko’s business. He might even be able to point you in the direction of Niedermann.”

One of the detectives from Göteborg said: “What have we found at the farm in Gosseberga?”

“We found four revolvers. A Sig Sauer that had been dismantled and was being oiled on the kitchen table. A Polish P-83 Wanad on the floor next to the bench in the kitchen. A Colt 1911 Government – that’s the pistol that Blomkvist tried to hand in to Paulsson. And finally a.22 calibre Browning, which is pretty much a toy gun alongside the others. We rather think that it was the weapon used to shoot Salander, given that she’s still alive with a slug in her brain.”

“Anything else?”

“We found and confiscated a bag containing about 200,000 kronor. It was in an upstairs room used by Niedermann.”

“How do you know it was his room?”

“Well, he does wear a size XXL. Zalachenko is at most a medium.”

“Do you have anything on Zalachenko or Bodin in your records?” Holmberg said.

Erlander shook his head.

“Of course it depends on how we interpret the confiscated weapons. Apart from the more sophisticated weaponry and an unusually sophisticated T.V. surveillance of the farm, we found nothing to distinguish it from any other farmhouse. The house itself is spartan, no frills.”

Just before noon there was a knock on the door and a uniformed officer delivered a document to Spångberg.

“We’ve received a call,” she said, “about a missing person in Alingsås. A dental nurse by the name of Anita Kaspersson left her home by car at 7.30 this morning. She took her child to day care and should have arrived at her place of work by 8.00. But she never did. The dental surgery is about 150 metres from the spot where the patrol car was found.”

Erlander and Modig both looked at their wristwatches.

“Then he has a four-hour head start. What kind of car is it?”

“A dark-blue 1991 Renault. Here’s the registration number.”

“Send out an A.P.B. on the vehicle at once. He could be in Oslo by now, or Malmö, or maybe even Stockholm.”

They brought the conference to a close by deciding that Modig and Erlander would together interrogate Zalachenko.

Cortez frowned and followed Berger with his gaze as she cut across the hall from her office to the kitchenette. She returned moments later with a cup of coffee, went back into her office and closed the door.

Cortez could not put his finger on what was wrong. Millennium was the kind of small office where co-workers were close. He had worked part-time at the magazine for four years, and during that time the team had weathered some phenomenal storms, especially during the period when Blomkvist was serving a three-month sentence for libel and the magazine almost went under. Then their colleague Dag Svensson was murdered, and his girlfriend too.

Through all these storms Berger had been the rock that nothing seemed capable of shifting. He was not surprised that she had called to wake him early that morning and put him and Lottie Karim to work. The Salander affair had cracked wide open, and Blomkvist had got himself somehow involved in the killing of a policeman in Göteborg. So far, everything was under control. Karim had parked herself at police headquarters and was doing her best to get some solid information out of someone. Cortez had spent the morning making calls, piecing together what had happened overnight. Blomkvist was not answering his telephone, but from a number of sources Cortez had a fairly clear picture of the events of the night before.

Berger, on the other hand, had been distracted all morning. It was rare for her to close the door to her office. That usually happened only when she had a visitor or was working intently on some problem. This morning she had not had a single visitor, and she was not – so far as he could judge – working. On several occasions when he had knocked on the door to relay some news, he had found her sitting in the chair by the window. She seemed lost in thought, as listlessly she watched the stream of people walking down below on Götgatan. She had paid scant attention to his reports.

Something was wrong.

The doorbell interrupted his ruminations. He went to open it and found the lawyer Annika Giannini. Cortez had met Blomkvist’s sister a few times, but he did not know her well.

“Hello, Annika,” he said. “Mikael isn’t here today.”

“I know. I want to talk to Erika.”

Berger barely looked up from her position by the window, but she quickly pulled herself together when she saw who it was.

“Hello,” she said. “Mikael isn’t here today.”

Giannini smiled. “I know. I’m here for Björck’s Säpo report. Micke asked me to take a look at it in case it turns out that I represent Salander.”

Berger nodded. She got up, took a folder from her desk and handed it to Giannini.

Giannini hesitated a moment, wondering whether to leave the office. Then she made up her mind and, uninvited, sat down opposite Berger.

“O.K… what’s going on with you?”

“I’m about to resign from Millennium, and I haven’t been able to tell Mikael. He’s been so tied up in this Salander mess that there hasn’t been the right opportunity, and I can’t tell the others before I tell him. Right now I just feel like shit.”

Giannini bit her lower lip. “So you’re telling me instead. Why are you leaving?”

“I’m going to be editor-in-chief of Svenska Morgon-Posten.”

“Jesus. Well, in that case, congratulations seem to be in order rather than any weeping or gnashing of teeth.”

“Annika… this isn’t the way I had planned to end my time at Millennium. In the middle of bloody chaos. But the offer came like a bolt from the blue, and I can’t say no. I mean… it’s the chance of a lifetime. But I got the offer just before Dag and Mia were shot, and there’s been such turmoil here that I buried it. And now I have the world’s worst guilty conscience.”

“I understand. But now you’re afraid of telling Micke.”

“It’s an utter disaster. I haven’t told anybody. I thought I wouldn’t be starting at S.M.P. until after the summer, and that there would still be time to tell everyone. But now they want me to start asap.”

She fell silent and stared at Annika. She looked on the verge of tears.

“This is, in point of fact, my last week at Millennium. Next week I’ll be on a trip, and then… I need about a fortnight off to recharge my batteries. I start at S.M.P. on the first of May.”

“Well, what would have happened if you’d been run over by a bus? Then they would have been without an editor-in-chief with only a moment’s notice.”

Erika looked up. “But I haven’t been run over by a bus. I’ve been deliberately keeping quiet about my decision for weeks now.”

“I can see this is a difficult situation, but I’ve got a feeling that Micke and Christer Malm and the others will be able to work things out. I think you ought to tell them right away.”

“Alright, but your damned brother is in Göteborg today. He’s asleep and has turned off his mobile.”

“I know. There aren’t many people who are as stubborn as Mikael about not being available when you need him. But Erika, this isn’t about you and Micke. I know that you’ve worked together for twenty years or so and you’ve had your ups and downs, but you have to think about Christer and the others on the staff too.”

“I’ve been keeping it under wraps all this time – Mikael’s going to –”

“Micke’s going to go through the roof, of course he is. But if he can’t handle the fact that you screwed up one time in twenty years, then he isn’t worth the time you’ve put in for him.”

Berger sighed.

“Pull yourself together,” Giannini told her. “Call Christer in, and the rest of the staff. Right now.”

Malm sat motionless for a few seconds. Berger had gathered her colleagues into Millennium’s small conference room with only a few minutes’ notice, just as he was about to leave early. He glanced at Cortez and Karim. They were as astonished as he was. Malin Eriksson, the assistant editor, had not known anything either, nor had Monika Nilsson, the reporter, or the advertising manager Magnusson. Blomkvist was the only one absent from the meeting. He was in Göteborg being his usual Blomkvist self.

Good God. Mikael doesn’t know anything about it either, thought Malm. How on earth is he going to react?

Then he realized that Berger had stopped talking, and it was as silent as the grave in the conference room. He shook his head, stood up, and spontaneously gave Berger a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

“Congrats, Ricky,” he said. “Editor-in-chief of S.M.P. That’s not a bad step up from this sorry little rag.”

Cortez came to life and began to clap. Berger held up her hands.

“Stop,” she said. “I don’t deserve any applause today.” She looked around at her colleagues in the cramped editorial office. “Listen… I’m terribly sorry that it had to be this way. I wanted to tell you so many weeks ago, but the news sort of got drowned out by all the turmoil surrounding Dag and Mia. Mikael and Malin have been working like demons, and… it just didn’t ever seem like the right time or place. And that’s how we’ve arrived at this point today.”

Eriksson realized with terrible clarity how understaffed the paper was, and how empty it was going to seem without Berger. No matter what happened, or whatever problem arose, Berger had been a boss she could always rely on. Well… no wonder the biggest morning daily had recruited her. But what was going to happen now? Erika had always been a crucial part of Millennium.

“There are a few things we have to get straight. I’m perfectly aware that this is going to create difficulties in the office. I didn’t want it to, but that’s the way things are. First of all: I won’t abandon Millennium. I’m going to stay on as a partner and will attend board meetings. I won’t, of course, have any influence in editorial matters.”

Malm nodded thoughtfully.

“Secondly, I officially leave on the last day of April. But today is my last day of work. Next week I’ll be travelling, as you know. It’s been planned for a long time. And I’ve decided not to come back here to put in any days during the transition period.” She paused for a moment. “The next issue of the magazine is ready in the computer. There are a few minor things that need fixing. It will be my final issue. A new editor-in-chief will have to take over. I’m clearing my desk tonight.”

There was absolute silence in the room.

“The selection of a new editor-in-chief will have to be discussed and made by the board. It’s something that you all on the staff will have to talk through.”

“Mikael,” Malm said.

“No. Never Mikael. He’s surely the worst possible editor-in-chief you could pick. He’s perfect as publisher and damned good at editing articles and tying up loose ends in work that is going to be published. He’s the fixer. The editor-in-chief has to be the one who takes the initiative. Mikael also has a tendency to bury himself in his own stories and be totally off the radar for weeks at a time. He’s at his best when things heat up, but he’s incredibly bad at routine work. You all know that.”

Malm muttered his assent and then said: “Millennium functioned because you and Mikael were a good balance for each other.”

“That’s not the only reason. You remember when Mikael was up in Hedestad sulking for almost a whole bloody year. Millennium functioned without him precisely the way the magazine is going to have to function without me now.”

“O.K. What’s your plan?”

“My choice would be for you, Christer, to take over as editor-inchief.”

“Not on your life.” Malm threw up his hands.

“But since I knew that’s what you would say, I have another solution. Malin. You can start as acting editor-in-chief as from today.”

“Me?” Eriksson said. She sounded shocked.

“Yes, you. You’ve been damned good as assistant editor.”

“But I –”

“Give it a try. I’ll be out of my office tonight. You can move in on Monday morning. The May issue is done – we’ve already worked hard on it. June is a double issue, and then you have a month off. If it doesn’t work, the board will have to find somebody else for August. Henry… you’ll have to go full-time and take Malin’s place as assistant editor. Then we’ll need to hire a new employee. But that will be up to all of you, and to the board.”

She studied the group thoughtfully.

“One more thing. I’ll be starting at another publication. For all practical purposes, S.M.P. and Millennium are not competitors, but nevertheless I don’t want to know any more than I already do about the content of the next two issues. All such matters should be discussed with Malin, effective immediately.”

“What should we do about this Salander story?” Cortez said.

“Discuss it with Mikael. I know something about Salander, but I’m putting what I know in mothballs. I won’t take it to S.M.P.”

Berger suddenly felt an enormous wave of relief. “That’s about it,” she said, and she ended the meeting by getting up and going back to her office without another word.

Millennium’s staff sat in silence.

It was not until an hour later that Eriksson knocked on Berger’s door.

“Hello there.”

“Yes?” said Berger.

“The staff would like to have a word.”

“What is it?”

“Out here.”

Berger got up and went to the door. They had set a table with cake and Friday afternoon coffee.

“We think we should have a party and give you a real send-off in due course,” Malm said. “But for now, coffee and cake will have to do.”

Berger smiled, for the first time in a long time.

CHAPTER 3

Zalachenko had been awake for eight hours when Inspectors Modig and Erlander came to his room at 7.00 in the evening. He had undergone a rather extensive operation in which a significant section of his jaw was realigned and fixed with titanium screws. His head was wrapped in so many bandages that you could see only his left eye and a narrow slit of mouth. A doctor had explained that the axe blow had crushed his cheekbone and damaged his forehead, peeling off a large part of the flesh on the right side of his face and tugging at his eye socket. His injuries were causing him immense pain. He had been given large doses of painkillers, yet was relatively lucid and able to talk. But the officers were warned not to tire him.

“Good evening, Herr Zalachenko,” Modig said. She introduced herself and her colleague.

“My name is Karl Axel Bodin,” Zalachenko said laboriously through clenched teeth. His voice was steady.

“I know exactly who you are. I’ve read your file from Säpo.”

This, of course, was not true.

“That was a long time ago,” Zalachenko said. “I’m Karl Axel Bodin now.”

“How are you doing? Are you able to have a conversation?”

“I want to report a serious crime. I have been the victim of attempted murder by my daughter.”

“We know. That matter will be taken up at the appropriate time,” Erlander said. “But we have more urgent issues to talk about.”

“What could be more urgent than attempted murder?”

“Right now we need information from you about three murders in Stockholm, at least three murders in Nykvarn, and a kidnapping.”

“I don’t know anything about that. Who was murdered?”

“Herr Bodin, we have good reason to believe that your associate, 35-year-old Ronald Niedermann, is guilty of these crimes,” Erlander said. “Last night he also murdered a police officer from Trollhättan.”

Modig was surprised that Erlander had acquiesced to Zalachenko’s wish to be called Bodin. Zalachenko turned his head a little so that he could see Erlander. His voice softened slightly.

“That is… unfortunate to hear. I know nothing about Niedermann’s affairs. I have not killed any policeman. I was the victim of attempted murder myself last night.”

“There’s a manhunt under way for Ronald Niedermann even as we speak. Do you have any idea where he might hide?”

“I am not aware of the circles he moves in. I…” Zalachenko hesitated a few seconds. His voice took on a confidential tone. “I must admit… just between us… that sometimes I worry about Niedermann.”

Erlander bent towards him.

“What do you mean?”

“I have discovered that he can be a violent person… I am actually afraid of him.”

“You mean you felt threatened by Niedermann?” Erlander said.

“Precisely. I’m old and handicapped. I cannot defend myself.”

“Could you explain your relationship to Niedermann?”

“I’m disabled.” Zalachenko gestured towards his feet. “This is the second time my daughter has tried to kill me. I hired Niedermann as an assistant a number of years ago. I thought he could protect me… but he has actually taken over my life. He comes and goes as he pleases… I have nothing more to say about it.”

“What does he help you with?” Modig broke in. “Doing things that you can’t do yourself?”

Zalachenko gave Modig a long look with his only visible eye.

“I understand that your daughter threw a Molotov cocktail into your car in the early ’90s,” Modig said. “Can you explain what prompted her to do that?”

“You would have to ask my daughter. She is mentally ill.” His tone was again hostile.

“You mean that you can’t think of any reason why Lisbeth Salander attacked you in 1991?”

“My daughter is mentally ill. There is substantial documentation.”

Modig cocked her head to one side. Zalachenko’s answers were much more aggressive and hostile when she asked the questions. She saw that Erlander had noticed the same thing. O.K… Good cop, bad cop. Modig raised her voice.

“You don’t think that her actions could have anything to do with the fact that you had beaten her mother so badly that she suffered permanent brain damage?”

Zalachenko turned his head towards Modig.

“That is all bullshit. Her mother was a whore. It was probably one of her punters who beat her up. I just happened to be passing by.”

Modig raised her eyebrows. “So you’re completely innocent?”

“Of course I am.”

“Zalachenko… let me repeat that to see if I’ve understood you correctly. You say that you never beat your girlfriend, Agneta Sofia Salander, Lisbeth’s mother, despite the fact that the whole business is the subject of a long report, stamped top secret, written at the time by your handler at Säpo, Gunnar Björck.”

“I was never convicted of anything. I have never been charged. I cannot help it if some idiot in the Security Police fantasizes in his reports. If I had been a suspect, they would have at the very least questioned me.”

Modig made no answer. Zalachenko seemed to be grinning beneath his bandages.

“So I wish to press charges against my daughter. For trying to kill me.”

Modig sighed. “I’m beginning to understand why she felt an uncontrollable urge to slam an axe into your head.”

Erlander cleared his throat. “Excuse me, Herr Bodin… We should get back to any information you might have about Ronald Niedermann’s activities.”

Modig made a call to Inspector Bublanski from the corridor outside Zalachenko’s hospital room.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing?” Bublanski said.

“He’s lodging a complaint with the police against Salander – for G.B.H. and attempted murder. He says that he had nothing to do with the murders in Stockholm.”

“And how does he explain the fact that Salander was buried in a trench on his property in Gosseberga?”

“He says he had a cold and was asleep most of the day. If Salander was shot in Gosseberga, it must have been something that Niedermann decided to do.”

“O.K. So what do we have?”

“She was shot with a Browning.22 calibre. Which is why she’s still alive. We found the weapon. Zalachenko admits that it’s his.”

“I see. In other words, he knows we’re going to find his prints on the gun.”

“Exactly. But he says that the last time he saw the gun, it was in his desk drawer.”

“Which means that the excellent Herr Niedermann took the weapon while Zalachenko was asleep and shot Salander. This is one cold bastard. Do we have any evidence to the contrary?”

Modig thought for a few seconds before she replied. “He’s well versed in Swedish law and police procedure. He doesn’t admit to a thing, and he has Niedermann as a scapegoat. I don’t have any idea what we can prove. I asked Erlander to send his clothes to forensics and have them examined for traces of gunpowder, but he’s bound to say that he was doing target practice two days ago.”

Salander was aware of the smell of almonds and ethanol. It felt as if she had alcohol in her mouth and she tried to swallow, but her tongue felt numb and paralysed. She tried to open her eyes, but she could not. In the distance she heard a voice that seemed to be talking to her, but she could not understand the words. Then she heard the voice quite clearly.

“I think she’s coming round.”

She felt someone touch her forehead and tried to brush away the intrusive hand. At the same moment she felt intense pain in her left shoulder. She forced herself to relax.

“Can you hear me, Lisbeth?”

Go away.

“Can you open your eyes?”

Who was this bloody idiot harping on at her?

Finally she did open her eyes. At first she just saw strange lights until a figure appeared in the centre of her field of vision. She tried to focus her gaze, but the figure kept slipping away. She felt as if she had a stupendous hangover and the bed seemed to keep tilting backwards.

“Pnkllrs,” she said.

“Say that again?”

“’diot,” she said.

“That sounds good. Can you open your eyes again?”

She opened her eyes to narrow slits. She saw the face of a complete stranger and memorized every detail. A blond man with intense blue eyes and a tilted, angular face about a foot from hers.

“Hello. My name is Anders Jonasson. I’m a doctor. You’re in a hospital. You were injured and you’re waking up after an operation. Can you tell me your name?”

“Pshalandr,” Salander said.

“O.K. Would you do me a favour and count to ten?”

“One two four… no… three four five six…”

Then she passed out.

Dr Jonasson was pleased with the response he had got. She had said her name and started to count. That meant that she still had her cognitive abilities somewhat intact and was not going to wake up a vegetable. He wrote down her wake-up time as 9.06 p.m., about sixteen hours after he had finished the operation. He had slept most of the day and then drove back to the hospital at around 7.00 in the evening. He was actually off that day, but he had some paperwork to catch up on.

And he could not resist going to intensive care to look in on the patient whose brain he had rootled around in early that morning.

“Let her sleep a while, but check her E.E.G. regularly. I’m worried there might be swelling or bleeding in the brain. She seemed to have sharp pain in her left shoulder when she tried to move her arm. If she wakes up again you can give her two mg. of morphine per hour.”

He felt oddly exhilarated as he left by the main entrance of Sahlgrenska.

Anita Kaspersson, a dental nurse who lived in Alingsås, was shaking all over as she stumbled through the woods. She had severe hypothermia. She wore only a pair of wet trousers and a thin sweater. Her bare feet were bleeding. She had managed to free herself from the barn where the man had tied her up, but she could not untie the rope that bound her hands behind her back. Her fingers had no feeling in them at all.

She felt as if she were the last person on earth, abandoned by everyone.

She had no idea where she was. It was dark and she had no sense of how long she had been aimlessly walking. She was amazed to be still alive.

And then she saw a light through the trees and stopped.

For several minutes she did not dare to approach the light. She pushed through some bushes and stood in the yard of a one-storey house of grey brick. She looked about her in astonishment.

She staggered to the door and turned to kick it with her heel.

Salander opened her eyes and saw a light in the ceiling. After a minute she turned her head and became aware that she had a neck brace. She had a heavy, dull headache and acute pain in her left shoulder. She closed her eyes.

Hospital, she thought. What am I doing here?

She felt exhausted, could hardly get her thoughts in order. Then the memories came rushing back to her. For several seconds she was seized by panic as the fragmented images of how she had dug herself out of a trench came flooding over her. Then she clenched her teeth and concentrated on breathing.

She was alive, but she was not sure whether that was a good thing or bad.

She could not piece together all that had happened, but she summoned up a foggy mosaic of images from the woodshed and how she had swung an axe in fury and struck her father in the face. Zalachenko. Was he alive or dead?

She could not clearly remember what had happened with Niedermann. She had a memory of being surprised that he had run away and she did not know why.

Suddenly she remembered having seen Kalle Bastard Blomkvist. Perhaps she had dreamed the whole thing, but she remembered a kitchen – it must have been the kitchen in the Gosseberga farmhouse – and she thought she remembered seeing him coming towards her. I must have been hallucinating.

The events in Gosseberga seemed already like the distant past, or possibly a ridiculous dream. She concentrated on the present and opened her eyes again.

She was in a bad way. She did not need anyone to tell her that. She raised her right hand and felt her head. There were bandages. She had a brace on her neck. Then she remembered it all. Niedermann. Zalachenko. The old bastard had a pistol too. A.22 calibre Browning. Which, compared to all other handguns, had to be considered a toy. That was why she was still alive.

I was shot in the head. I could stick my finger in the entry wound and touch my brain.

She was surprised to be alive. Yet she felt indifferent. If death was the black emptiness from which she had just woken up, then death was nothing to worry about. She would hardly notice the difference. With which esoteric thought she closed her eyes and fell asleep again.

She had been dozing only a few minutes when she was aware of movement and opened her eyelids to a narrow slit. She saw a nurse in a white uniform bending over her. She closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep.

“I think you’re awake,” the nurse said.

“Mmm,” Salander said.

“Hello, my name is Marianne. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

Salander tried to nod, but her head was immobilized by the brace.

“No, don’t try to move. You don’t have to be afraid. You’ve been hurt and had surgery.”

“Could I have some water?” Salander whispered.

The nurse gave her a beaker with a straw to drink water through. As she swallowed the water she saw another person appear on her left side.

“Hello, Lisbeth. Can you hear me?”

“Mmm.”

“I’m Dr Helena Endrin. Do you know where you are?”

“Hospital.”

“You’re at the Sahlgrenska in Göteborg. You’ve had an operation and you’re in the intensive care unit.”

“Umm-hmm.”

“There is no need to be afraid.”

“I was shot in the head.”

Endrin hesitated for a moment, then said, “That’s right. So you remember what happened.”

“The old bastard had a pistol.”

“Ah… yes, well someone did.”

“A.22.”

“I see. I didn’t know that.”

“How badly hurt am I?”

“Your prognosis is good. You were in pretty bad shape, but we think you have a good chance of making a full recovery.”

Salander weighed this information. Then she tried to fix her eyes on the doctor. Her vision was blurred.

“What happened to Zalachenko?”

“Who?”

“The old bastard. Is he alive?”

“You must mean Karl Axel Bodin.”

“No, I don’t. I mean Alexander Zalachenko. That’s his real name.”

“I don’t know anything about that. But the elderly man who came in at the same time as you is critical but out of danger.”

Salander’s heart sank. She considered the doctor’s words.

“Where is he?”

“He’s down the hall. But don’t worry about him for the time being. You have to concentrate on getting well.”

Salander closed her eyes. She wondered whether she could manage to get out of bed, find something to use as a weapon, and finish the job. But she could scarcely keep her eyes open. She thought, He’s going to get away again. She had missed her chance to kill Zalachenko.

“I’d like to examine you for a moment. Then you can go back to sleep,” Dr Endrin said.

Blomkvist was suddenly awake and he did not know why. He did not know where he was, and then he remembered that he had booked himself a room in City Hotel. It was as dark as coal. He fumbled to turn on the bedside lamp and looked at the clock. 2.00. He had slept through fifteen hours.

He got up and went to the bathroom. He would not be able to get back to sleep. He shaved and took a long shower. Then he put on some jeans and the maroon sweatshirt that needed washing. He called the front desk to ask if he could get coffee and a sandwich at this early hour. The night porter said that was possible.

He put on his sports jacket and went downstairs. He ordered a coffee and a cheese and liver pâté sandwich. He bought the Göteborgs-Posten. The arrest of Lisbeth Salander was front-page news. He took his breakfast back to his room and read the paper. The reports at the time of going to press were somewhat confused, but they were on the right track. Ronald Niedermann, thirty-five, was being sought for the killing of a policeman. The police wanted to question him also in connection with the murders in Stockholm. The police had released nothing about Salander’s condition, and the name Zalachenko was not mentioned. He was referred to only as a 66-year-old landowner from Gosseberga, and apparently the media had taken him for an innocent victim.

When Blomkvist had finished reading, he flipped open his mobile and saw that he had twenty unread messages. Three were messages to call Berger. Two were from his sister Annika. Fourteen were from reporters at various newspapers who wanted to talk to him. One was from Malm, who had sent him the brisk advice: It would be best if you took the first train home.

Blomkvist frowned. That was unusual, coming from Malm. The text was sent at 7.06 in the evening. He stifled the impulse to call and wake someone up at 3.00 in the morning. Instead he booted up his iBook and plugged the cable into the broadband jack. He found that the first train to Stockholm left at 5.20, and there was nothing new in Aftonbladet online.

He opened a new Word document, lit a cigarette, and sat for three minutes staring at the blank screen. Then he began to type.

He wrote steadily for fifty minutes, primarily a recapitulation of the night on which he had found Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson and why the police had focused on Salander as the suspected killer. He quoted the newspaper headlines about lesbian Satanists and the media’s apparent hope that the murders might have involved S.&M. sex.

When he checked the clock he quickly closed his iBook. He packed his bag and went down to the front desk. He paid with a credit card and took a taxi to Göteborg Central Station.

Blomkvist went straight to the dining car and ordered more coffee and sandwiches. He opened his iBook again and read through his text. He was so absorbed that he did not notice Inspector Modig until she cleared her throat and asked if she could join him. He looked up, smiled sheepishly, and closed his computer.

“On your way home?”

“You too, I see.”

She nodded. “My colleague is staying another day.”

“Do you know anything about how Salander is? I’ve been sound asleep since I last saw you.”

“She had an operation soon after she was brought in and was awake in the early evening. The doctors think she’ll make a full recovery. She was incredibly lucky.”

Blomkvist nodded. It dawned on him that he had not been worried about her. He had assumed that she would survive. Any other outcome was unthinkable.

“Has anything else of interest happened?” he said.

Modig wondered how much she should say to a reporter, even to one who knew more of the story than she did. On the other hand, she had joined him at his table, and maybe a hundred other reporters had by now been briefed at police headquarters.

“I don’t want to be quoted,” she said.

“I’m simply asking out of personal interest.”

She told him that a nationwide manhunt was under way for Ronald Niedermann, particularly in the Malmö area.

“And Zalachenko? Have you questioned him?”

“Yes, we questioned him.”

“And?”

“I can’t tell you anything about that.”

“Come on, Sonja. I’ll know exactly what you talked about less than an hour after I get to my office in Stockholm. And I won’t write a word of what you tell me.”

She hesitated for a while before she met his gaze.

“He made a formal complaint against Salander, that she tried to kill him. She risks being charged with grievous bodily harm or attempted murder.”

“And in all likelihood she’ll claim self-defence.”

“I hope she will,” Modig said.

“That doesn’t sound like an official line.”

“Bodin… Zalachenko is as slippery as an eel and he has an answer to all our questions. I’m persuaded that things are more or less as you told us yesterday, and that means that Salander has been subjected to a lifetime of injustice – since she was twelve.”

“That’s the story I’m going to publish,” Blomkvist said.

“It won’t be popular with some people.”

Modig hesitated again. Blomkvist waited.

“I talked with Bublanski half an hour ago. He didn’t go into any detail, but the preliminary investigation against Salander for the murder of your friends seems to have been shelved. The focus has shifted to Niedermann.”

“Which means that…” He let the question hang in the air between them.

Modig shrugged.

“Who’s going to take over the investigation of Salander?”

“I don’t know. What happened in Gosseberga is primarily Göteborg’s problem. I would guess that somebody in Stockholm will be assigned to compile all the material for a prosecution.”

“I see. What do you think the odds are that the investigation will be transferred to Säpo?”

Modig shook her head.

Just before they reached Alingsås, Blomkvist leaned towards her. “Sonja… I think you understand how things stand. If the Zalachenko story gets out, there’ll be a massive scandal. Säpo people conspired with a psychiatrist to lock Salander up in an asylum. The only thing they can do now is to stonewall and go on claiming that Salander is mentally ill, and that committing her in 1991 was justified.”

Modig nodded.

“I’m going to do everything I can to counter any such claims. I believe that Salander is as sane as you or I. Odd, certainly, but her intellectual gifts are undeniable.” He paused to let what he had said sink in. “I’m going to need somebody on the inside I can trust.”

She met his gaze. “I’m not competent to judge whether or not Salander is mentally ill.”

“But you are competent to say whether or not she was the victim of a miscarriage of justice.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I’m only asking you to let me know if you discover that Salander is being subjected to another miscarriage of justice.”

Modig said nothing.

“I don’t want details of the investigation or anything like that. I just need to know what’s happening with the charges against her.”

“It sounds like a good way for me to get booted off the force.”

“You would be a source. I would never, ever mention your name.”

He wrote an email address on a page torn from his notebook.

“This is an untraceable hotmail address. You can use it if you have anything to tell me. Don’t use your official address, obviously, just set up your own temporary hotmail account.”

She put the address into the inside pocket of her jacket. She did not make him any promises.

Inspector Erlander woke at 7.00 on Saturday morning to the ringing of his telephone. He heard voices from the T.V. and smelled coffee from the kitchen where his wife was already about her morning chores. He had returned to his apartment in Mölndal at 1.00 in the morning having being on duty for twenty-two hours, so he was far from wide awake when he reached to answer it.

“Rikardsson, night shift. Are you awake?”

“No,” Erlander said. “Hardly. What’s happened?”

“News. Anita Kaspersson has been found.”

“Where?”

“Outside Seglora, south of Borås.”

Erlander visualized the map in his head.

“South,” he said. “He’s taking the back roads. He must have driven up the 180 through Borås and swung south. Have we alerted Malmö?”

“Yes, and Helsingborg, Landskrona, and Trelleborg. And Karlskrona. I’m thinking of the ferry to the east.”

Erlander rubbed the back of his neck.

“He has almost a 24-hour head start now. He could be clean out of the country. How was Kaspersson found?”

“She turned up at a house on the outskirts of Seglora.”

“She what?”

“She knocked –”

“You mean she’s alive?”

“I’m sorry, I’m not expressing myself clearly enough. The Kaspersson woman kicked on the door of a house at 3.10 this morning, scaring the hell out of a couple and their kids, who were all asleep. She was barefoot and suffering from severe hypothermia. Her hands were tied behind her back. She’s at the hospital in Borås, reunited with her husband.”

“Amazing. I think we all assumed she was dead.”

“Sometimes you can be surprised. But here’s the bad news: Assistant County Police Chief Spångberg has been here since 5.00 this morning. She’s made it plain that she wants you up and over to Borås to interview the woman.”

It was Saturday morning and Blomkvist assumed that the Millennium offices would be empty. He called Malm as the train was coming into Stockholm and asked him what had prompted the tone of his text message.

“Have you had breakfast?” Malm said.

“On the train.”

“O.K. Come over to my place and I’ll make you something more substantial.”

“What’s this about?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

Blomkvist took the tunnelbana to Medborgarplatsen and walked to Allhelgonagatan. Malm’s boyfriend, Arnold Magnusson, opened the door to him. No matter how hard Blomkvist tried, he could never rid himself of the feeling that he was looking at an advertisement for something. Magnusson was often onstage at the Dramaten, and was one of Sweden’s most popular actors. It was always a shock to meet him in person. Blomkvist was not ordinarily impressed by celebrity, but Magnusson had such a distinctive appearance and was so familiar from his T.V. and film roles, in particular for playing the irascible but honest Inspector Frisk in a wildly popular T.V. series that aired in ninety-minute episodes. Blomkvist always expected him to behave just like Gunnar Frisk.

“Hello, Micke,” Magnusson said.

“Hello,” Blomkvist said.

“In the kitchen.”

Malm was serving up freshly made waffles with cloudberry jam and coffee. Blomkvist’s appetite was revived even before he sat down. Malm wanted to know what had happened in Gosseberga. Blomkvist gave him a succinct account. He was into his third waffle before he remembered to ask what was going on.

“We had a little problem at Millennium while you were away Blomkvisting in Göteborg.”

Blomkvist looked at Malm intently.

“What was that?”

“Oh, nothing serious. Erika has taken the job of editor-in-chief at Svenska Morgon-Posten. She finished at Millennium yesterday.”

It was several seconds before he could absorb the whole impact of the news. He sat there stunned, but did not doubt the truth of it.

“Why didn’t she tell anyone before?” he said at last.

“Because she wanted to tell you first, and you’ve been running around being unreachable for several weeks now, and because she probably thought you had your hands full with the Salander story. She obviously wanted to tell you first, so she couldn’t tell the rest of us, and time kept slipping by… And then she found herself with an unbearably guilty conscience and was feeling terrible. And not one of us had noticed a thing.”

Blomkvist shut his eyes. “Goddamnit,” he said.

“I know. Now it turns out that you’re the last one in the office to find out. I wanted to have the chance to tell you myself so that you’d understand what happened and not think anyone was doing anything behind your back.”

“No, I don’t think that. But, Jesus… it’s wonderful that she got the job, if she wants to work at S.M.P…, but what the hell are we going to do?”

“Malin’s going to be acting editor-in-chief starting with the next issue.”

“Eriksson?”

“Unless you want to be editor-in-chief…”

“Good God, no.”

“That’s what I thought. So Malin’s going to be editor-in-chief.”

“Have you appointed an assistant editor?”

“Henry. It’s four years he’s been with us. Hardly an apprentice any longer.”

“Do I have a say in this?”

“No,” Malm said.

Blomkvist gave a dry laugh. “Right. We’ll let it stand the way you’ve decided. Malin is tough, but she’s unsure of herself. Henry shoots from the hip a little too often. We’ll have to keep an eye on both of them.”

“Yes, we will.”

Blomkvist sat in silence, cradling his coffee. It would be damned empty without Berger, and he wasn’t sure how things would turn out at the magazine.

“I have to call Erika and –”

“No, better not.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s sleeping at the office. Go and wake her up or something.”

Blomkvist found Berger sound asleep on the sofa-bed in her office. She had been up until all hours emptying her desk and bookshelves of all personal belongings and sorting papers that she wanted to keep. She had filled five packing crates. He looked at her for a while from the doorway before he went in and sat down on the edge of the sofa and woke her.

“Why in heaven’s name don’t you go over to my place and sleep if you have to sleep on the job,” he said.

“Hi, Mikael,” she said.

“Christer told me.”

She started to say something, but he bent down and kissed her on the cheek.

“Are you livid?”

“Insanely,” he said.

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t turn it down. But it feels wrong, to leave all of you in the lurch in such a bad situation.”

“I’m hardly the person to criticize you for abandoning ship. I left you in the lurch in a situation that was much worse than this.”

“The two have nothing to do with each other. You took a break. I’m leaving for good and I didn’t tell anybody. I’m so sorry.”

Blomkvist gave her a wan smile.

“When it’s time, it’s time.” Then he added in English, “A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do and all that crap.”

Berger smiled. Those were the words she had said to him when he moved to Hedeby. He reached out his hand and mussed her hair affectionately.

“I can understand why you’d want to quit this madhouse… but to be the head of Sweden’s most turgid old-boy newspaper… that’s going to take some time to sink in.”

“There are quite a few girls working there nowadays.”

“Rubbish. Check the masthead. It’s status quo all the way. You must be a raving masochist. Shall we go and have some coffee?”

Berger sat up. “I have to know what happened in Göteborg.”

“I’m writing the story now,” Blomkvist said. “And there’s going to be war when we publish it. We’ll put it out in at the same time as the trial. I hope you’re not thinking of taking the story with you to S.M.P. The fact is I need you to write something on the Zalachenko story before you leave here.”

“Micke… I…”

“Your very last editorial. Write it whenever you like. It almost certainly won’t be published before the trial, whenever that might be.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea. What do you think it should be about?”

“Morality,” Blomkvist said. “And the story of why one of our colleagues was murdered because the government didn’t do its job fifteen years ago.”

Berger knew exactly what kind of editorial he wanted. She had been at the helm when Svensson was murdered, after all. She suddenly felt in a much better mood.

“O.K.,” she said. “My last editorial.”

CHAPTER 4

By 1.00 on Saturday afternoon, Prosecutor Fransson in Södertälje had finished her deliberations. The burial ground in the woods in Nykvarn was a wretched mess, and the Violent Crimes Division had racked up a vast amount of overtime since Wednesday, when Paolo Roberto had fought his boxing match with Niedermann in the warehouse there. They were dealing with at least three murders with the bodies found buried on the property, along with the kidnapping and assault of Salander’s friend Miriam Wu, and on top of it all, arson.

The incident in Stallarholmen was connected with the discoveries at Nykvarn, and was actually located within the Strängnäs police district in Södermanland county. Carl-Magnus Lundin of the Svavelsjö Motorcycle Club was a key player in the whole thing, but he was in hospital in Södertälje with one foot in a cast and his jaw wired shut. Accordingly, all of these crimes came under county police jurisdiction, which meant that Stockholm would have the last word.

On Friday the court hearing was held. Lundin was formally charged in connection with Nykvarn. It had eventually been established that the warehouse was owned by the Medimport Company, which in turn was owned by one Anneli Karlsson, a 52-year-old cousin of Lundin who lived in Puerto Banús, Spain. She had no criminal record.

Fransson closed the folder that held all the preliminary investigation papers. These were still in the early stages and there would need to be another hundred pages of detailed work before they were ready to go to trial. But right now she had to make decisions on several matters. She looked up at her police colleagues.

“We have enough evidence to charge Lundin with participating in the kidnapping of Miriam Wu. Paolo Roberto has identified him as the man who drove the van. I’m also going to charge him with probable involvement in arson. We’ll hold back on charging him with the murders of the three individuals we dug up on the property, at least until each of them has been identified.”

The officers nodded. That was what they had been expecting.

“What’ll we do about Sonny Nieminen?”

Fransson leafed through to the section on Nieminen in the papers on her desk.

“This is a man with an impressive criminal history. Robbery, possession of illegal weapons, assault, G.B.H., manslaughter and drug crime. He was arrested with Lundin at Stallarholmen. I’m convinced that he’s involved, but we don’t have the evidence to persuade a court.”

“He says he’s never been to the Nykvarn warehouse and that he just happened to be out with Lundin on a motorcycle ride,” said the detective responsible for Stallarholmen on behalf of the Södertälje police. “He claims he had no idea what Lundin was up to in Stallarholmen.”

Fransson wondered whether she could somehow arrange to hand the entire business over to Prosecutor Ekström in Stockholm.

“Nieminen refuses to say anything about what happened,” the detective went on, “but he vehemently denies being involved in any crime.”

“You’d think he and Lundin were themselves the victims of a crime in Stallarholmen,” Fransson said, drumming her fingertips in annoyance. “Lisbeth Salander,” she added, her voice scored with scepticism. “We’re talking about a girl who looks as if she’s barely entered puberty and who’s only one metre fifty tall. She doesn’t look as though she has the tonnage to take on either Nieminen or Lundin, let alone both of them.”

“Unless she was armed. A pistol would compensate for her physique.”

“But that doesn’t quite fit with our reconstruction of what happened.”

“No. She used Mace and kicked Lundin in the balls and face with such aggression that she crushed one of his testicles and then broke his jaw. The shot in Lundin’s foot must have happened after she kicked him. But I can’t swallow the scenario that says she was the one who was armed.”

“The lab has identified the weapon used on Lundin. It’s a Polish P-83 Wanad using Makarova ammo. It was found in Gosseberga outside Göteborg and it has Salander’s prints on it. We can pretty much assume that she took the pistol with her to Gosseberga.”

“Sure. But the serial number shows that the pistol was stolen four years ago in the robbery of a gun shop in Örebro. The thieves were eventually caught, but they had ditched the gun. It was a local thug with a drug problem who hung out around Svavelsjö M.C. I’d much rather place the pistol with either Lundin or Nieminen.”

“It could be as simple as Lundin carrying the pistol and Salander disarming him. Then a shot was fired accidentally that hit him in the foot. I mean, it can’t have been her intention to kill him, since he’s still alive.”

“Or else she shot him in the foot out of sheer sadism. Who’s to know? But how did she deal with Nieminen? He has no visible injuries.”

“He does have one, or rather two, small burn marks on his chest.”

“What sort of burns?”

“I’m guessing a taser.”

“So Salander was supposedly armed with a taser, a Mace canister and a pistol. How much would all that stuff weigh? No, I’m quite sure that either Lundin or Nieminen was carrying the gun, and she took it from them. We’re not going to be sure how Lundin came to get himself shot until one or other of the parties involved starts talking.”

“Alright.”

“As things now stand, Lundin has been charged for the reasons I mentioned earlier. But we don’t have a damned thing on Nieminen. I’m thinking of turning him loose this afternoon.”

Nieminen was in a vile mood when he left the cells at Södertälje police station. His mouth was dry so his first stop was a corner shop where he bought a Pepsi. He guzzled it down on the spot. He bought a pack of Lucky Strike and a tin of Göteborg’s Rapé snuff. He flipped open his mobile and checked the battery, then dialled the number of Hans-Åke Waltari, thirty-three years old and number three in Svavelsjö M.C.’s hierarchy. It rang four times before Waltari picked up.

“Nieminen. I’m out.”

“Congrats.”

“Where are you?”

“Nyköping.”

“What the fuck are you doing in Nyköping?”

“We decided to lay low when you and Magge were busted – until we knew the lay of the land.”

“So now you know the lay of the land. Where is everybody?”

Waltari told him where the other five members of Svavelsjö M.C. were located. The news neither pleased Nieminen nor made him any calmer.

“So who the fuck is minding the store while all of you hide away like a bunch of girls?”

“That’s not fair. You and Magge take off on some fucking job we know nothing about, and all of a sudden you’re mixed up in a shootout with that slut the law are after, Magge gets shot and you’re busted. Then they start digging up bodies at our warehouse in Nykvarn.”

“So?”

“So? So we were starting to wonder if maybe you and Magge were hiding something from the rest of us.”

“And what the fuck would that be? We’re the ones who took the job for the sake of the club.”

“Well, no-one ever told me that the warehouse was doubling up as a woodland cemetery. Who were those dead bodies?”

Nieminen had a vicious retort on the tip of his tongue, but he stopped himself. Waltari may be an idiot, but this was no time to start an argument. The important thing right now was to consolidate their forces. After stonewalling his way through five police interrogations, it was not a good idea to start boasting that he actually knew something on a mobile less than two hundred metres from a police station.

“Forget the bodies,” he said. “I don’t know anything about that. But Magge is in deep shit. He’s going to be in the slammer for a while, and while he’s gone, I’m running the club.”

“O.K. What happens now?” Waltari said.

“Who’s keeping an eye on the property?”

“Benny stayed at the clubhouse to hold the fort. They searched the place the day you were arrested. They didn’t find anything.”

“Benny Karlsson?” Nieminen yelled. “Benny K.’s hardly dry behind the ears.”

“Take it easy. He’s with that blond fucker you and Magge always hang out with.”

Sonny froze. He glanced around and walked away from the door of the corner shop.

“What did you say?” he asked in a low voice.

“That blond monster you and Magge hang out with, he showed up and needed a place to hide.”

“Goddamnit, Waltari! They’re looking for him all over the country!”

“Yeah… that’s why he needed somewhere to hide. What were we supposed to do? He’s your and Magge’s pal.”

Nieminen shut his eyes for ten full seconds. Niedermann had brought Svavelsjö M.C. a lot of jobs and good money for several years. But he was absolutely not a friend. He was a dangerous bastard and a psychopath – a psychopath that the police were looking for with a vengeance. Nieminen did not trust Niedermann for one second. The best thing would be if he was found with a bullet in his head. Then the manhunt would at least ease up a bit.

“So what did you do with him?”

“Benny’s taking care of him. He took him out to Viktor’s.”

Viktor Göransson was the club’s treasurer and financial expert, who lived just outside Järna. He was trained in accounting and had begun his career as financial adviser to a Yugoslav who owned a string of bars, until the whole gang ended up in the slammer for fraud. He had met Lundin at Kumla prison in the early nineties. He was the only member of Svavelsjö M.C. who normally wore a jacket and tie.

“Waltari, get in your car and meet me in Södertälje. I’ll be outside the train station in forty-five minutes.”

“Alright. But what’s the rush?”

“I have to get a handle on the situation. Do you want me to take the bus?”

Waltari sneaked a look at Nieminen sitting quiet as a mouse as they drove out to Svavelsjö. Unlike Lundin, Nieminen was never very easy to deal with. He had the face of a model and looked weak, but he had a short fuse and was a dangerous man, especially when he had been drinking. Just then he was sober, but Waltari felt uneasy about having Nieminen as their leader in the future. Lundin had somehow always managed to keep Nieminen in line. He wondered how things would unfold now with Lundin out of the way.

At the clubhouse, Benny was nowhere to be seen. Nieminen called him twice on his mobile, but got no answer.

They drove to Nieminen’s place, about half a mile further down the road. The police had carried out a search, but they had evidently found nothing of value to the Nykvarn investigation. Which was why Nieminen had been released.

He took a shower and changed his clothes while Waltari waited patiently in the kitchen. Then they walked about a hundred and fifty metres into the woods behind Nieminen’s property and scraped away the thin layer of soil that concealed a chest containing six handguns, including an AK5, a stack of ammunition, and around two kilos of explosives. This was Nieminen’s arms cache. Two of the guns were Polish P-83 Wanads. They came from the same batch as the weapon that Salander had taken from him at Stallarholmen.

Nieminen drove away all thought of Salander. It was an unpleasant subject. In the cell at Södertälje police station he had played the scene over and over in his head: how he and Lundin had arrived at Advokat Bjurman’s summer house and found Salander apparently just leaving.

Events had been rapid and unpredictable. He had ridden over there with Lundin to burn the damned summer cabin down. On the instructions of that goddamned blond monster. And then they had stumbled upon that bitch Salander – all alone, 1.5 metres tall, thin as a stick. Nieminen wondered how much she actually weighed. And then everything had gone to hell; had exploded in a brief orgy of violence neither of them was prepared for.

Objectively, he could describe the chain of events. Salander had a canister of Mace, which she sprayed in Lundin’s face. Lundin should have been ready, but he wasn’t. She kicked him twice, and you don’t need a lot of muscle to fracture a jaw. She took him by surprise. That could be explained.

But then she took him too, Sonny Nieminen, a man who well-trained men would avoid getting into a fight with. She moved so fast. He hadn’t been able to pull his gun. She had taken him out easily, as if brushing off a mosquito. It was humiliating. She had a taser. She had…

He could not remember a thing when he came to. Lundin had been shot in the foot and then the police showed up. After some palaver over jurisdiction between Strängnäs and Södertälje, he fetched up in the cells in Södertälje. Plus she had stolen Magge’s Harley. She had cut the badge out of his leather jacket – the very symbol that made people step aside in the queue at the bar, that gave him a status that was beyond most people’s wildest dreams. She had humiliated him.

Nieminen was boiling over. He had kept his mouth shut through the entire series of police interrogations. He would never be able to tell anyone what had happened in Stallarholmen. Until that moment Salander had meant nothing to him. She was a little side project that Lundin was messing around with… again commissioned by that bloody Niedermann. Now he hated her with a fury that astonished him. Usually he was cool and analytical, but he knew that some time in the future he would have to pay her back and erase the shame. But first he had to get a grip on the chaos that Svavelsjö M.C. had landed in because of Salander and Niedermann.

Nieminen took the two remaining Polish guns, loaded them, and handed one to Waltari.

“Have we got a plan?”

“We’re going to drive over and have a talk with Niedermann. He isn’t one of us, and he doesn’t have a criminal record. I don’t know how he’s going to react if they catch him, but if he talks he could send us all to the slammer. We’d be sent down so fast it’d make your head spin.”

“You mean we should…”

Nieminen had already decided that Niedermann had to be got rid of, but he knew that it would be a bad idea to frighten off Waltari before they were in place.

“I don’t know. We’ll see what he has in mind. If he’s planning to get out of the country as fast as hell then we could help him on his way. But as long as he risks being busted, he’s a threat to us.”

The lights were out at Göransson’s place when Nieminen and Waltari drove up in the twilight. That was not a good sign. They sat in the car and waited.

“Maybe they’re out,” Waltari said.

“Right. They went to the bar with Niedermann,” Nieminen said, opening the car door.

The front door was unlocked. Nieminen switched on an overhead light. They went from room to room. The house was well kept and neat, which was probably because of her, whatever-her-name-was, the woman Göransson lived with.

They found Göransson and his girlfriend in the basement, stuffed into a laundry room.

Nieminen bent down and looked at the bodies. He reached out a finger to touch the woman whose name he could not remember. She was ice-cold and stiff. That meant they had been dead maybe twenty-four hours.

Nieminen did not need the help of a pathologist to work out how they had died. Her neck had been broken when her head was turned 180 degrees. She was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and had no other injuries that Nieminen could see.

Göransson, on the other hand, wore only his underpants. He had been beaten, had blood and bruises all over his body. His arms were bent in impossible directions, like twisted tree limbs. The battering he had been subjected to could only be defined as torture. He had been killed, as far as Nieminen could judge, by a single blow to the neck. His larynx was rammed deep into his throat.

Nieminen went up the stairs and out of the front door. Waltari followed him. Nieminen walked the fifty metres to the barn. He flipped the hasp and opened the door.

He found a dark-blue 1991 Renault.

“What kind of car does Göransson have?” Nieminen said.

“He drove a Saab.”

Nieminen nodded. He fished some keys out of his jacket pocket and opened a door at the far end of the barn. One quick look around told him that they were there too late. The heavy weapons cabinet stood wide open.

Nieminen grimaced. “About 800,000 kronor,” he said.

“What?”

“Svavelsjö M.C. had about 800,000 kronor stashed in this cabinet. It was our treasury.”

Only three people knew where Svavelsjö M.C. kept the cash that was waiting to be invested and laundered. Göransson, Lundin, and Nieminen. Niedermann was on the run. He needed cash. He knew that Göransson was the one who handled the money.

Nieminen shut the door and walked slowly away from the barn. His mind was spinning as he tried to digest the catastrophe. Part of Svavelsjö M.C.’s assets were in the form of bonds that he could access, and some of their investments could be reconstructed with Lundin’s help. But a large part of them had been listed only in Göransson’s head, unless he had given clear instructions to Lundin. Which Nieminen doubted – Lundin had never been clever with money. Nieminen estimated that Svavelsjö M.C. had lost upwards of 60 per cent of its assets with Göransson’s death. It was a devastating blow. Above all they needed the cash to take care of day-to-day expenses.

“What do we do now?” Waltari said.

“We’ll go and tip off the police about what happened here.”

“Tip off the police?”

“Yes, damn it. My prints are all over the house. I want Göransson and his bitch to be found as soon as possible, so that forensics can work out that they died while I was still locked up.”

“I get it.”

“Good. Go and find Benny. I want to talk to him. If he’s still alive, that is. And then we’ll track down Niedermann. We’ll need every contact we have in the clubs all over Scandinavia to keep their eyes peeled. I want that bastard’s head on a platter. He’s probably riding around in Göransson’s Saab. Find out the registration number.”

When Salander woke up it was 2.00 on Saturday afternoon and a doctor was poking at her.

“Good morning,” he said. “My name is Benny Svantesson. I’m a doctor. Are you in pain?”

“Yes,” Salander said.

“I’ll make sure you get some painkillers in a minute. But first I’d like to examine you.”

He squeezed and poked and fingered her lacerated body. Salander was extremely aggravated by the time he had finished, but she held back; she was exhausted and decided it would be better to keep quiet than tarnish her stay at Sahlgrenska with a fight.

“How am I doing?” she said.

“You’ll pull through,” the doctor said and made some notes before he stood up. This was not very informative.

After he left, a nurse came in and helped Salander with a bedpan. Then she was allowed to go back to sleep.

Zalachenko, alias Karl Axel Bodin, was given a liquid lunch. Even small movements of his facial muscles caused sharp pains in his jaw and cheekbone, and chewing was out of the question. During surgery the night before, two titanium screws had been fixed into his jawbone.

But the pain was manageable. Zalachenko was used to pain. Nothing could compare with the pain he had undergone for several weeks, months even, fifteen years before when he had burned like a torch in his car. The follow-up care had been a marathon of agony.

The doctors had decided that his life was no longer at risk but that he was severely injured. In view of his age, he would stay in the intensive care unit for a few more days yet.

On Saturday he had four visitors.

At 10.00 a.m. Inspector Erlander returned. This time he had left that bloody Modig woman behind and instead was accompanied by Inspector Holmberg, who was much more agreeable. They asked pretty much the same questions about Niedermann as they had the night before. He had his story straight and did not slip up. When they started plying him with questions about his possible involvement in trafficking and other criminal activities, he again denied all knowledge of any such thing. He was living on a disability pension, and he had no idea what they were talking about. He blamed Niedermann for everything and offered to help them in any way he could to find the fugitive.

Unfortunately there was not much he could help with, practically speaking. He had no knowledge of the circles Niedermann moved in, or who he might go to for protection.

At around 11.00 he had a brief visit from a representative of the prosecutor’s office, who formally advised him that he was a suspect in the grievous bodily harm or attempted murder of Lisbeth Salander. Zalachenko patiently explained that, on the contrary, he was the victim of a crime, that in point of fact it was Salander who had attempted to murder him. The prosecutor’s office offered him legal assistance in the form of a public defence lawyer. Zalachenko said that he would mull over the matter.

Which he had no intention of doing. He already had a lawyer, and the first thing he needed to do that morning was call him and tell him to get down there as swiftly as he could. Martin Thomasson was therefore the third guest of the day at Zalachenko’s sickbed. He wandered in with a carefree expression, ran a hand through his thick blond hair, adjusted his glasses, and shook hands with his client. He was a chubby and very charming man. True, he was suspected of running errands for the Yugoslav mafia, a matter which was still under investigation, but he was also known for winning his cases.

Zalachenko had been referred to Thomasson through a business associate five years earlier, when he needed to restructure certain funds connected to a small financial firm that he owned in Liechtenstein. They were not dramatic sums, but Thomasson’s skill had been exceptional, and Zalachenko had avoided paying taxes on them. He then engaged Thomasson on a couple of other matters. Thomasson knew that the money came from criminal activity, which seemed not to trouble him. Ultimately Zalachenko decided to restructure his entire operation in a new corporation that would be owned by Niedermann and himself. He approached Thomasson and proposed that the lawyer come in as a third, silent partner to handle the financial side of the business. Thomasson accepted at once.

“So, Herr Bodin, none of this looks like much fun.”

“I have been the victim of grievous bodily harm and attempted murder,” Zalachenko said.

“I can see as much. A certain Lisbeth Salander, if I understood correctly.”

Zalachenko lowered his voice: “Our partner Niedermann, as you know, has really fouled his nest this time.”

“Indeed.”

“The police suspect that I am involved.”

“Which of course you are not. You’re a victim, and it’s important that we see to it at once that this is the image presented to the press. Ms Salander has already received a good deal of negative publicity… Let me deal with the situation.”

“Thank you.”

“But I have to remind you right from the start that I’m not a criminal lawyer. You’re going to need a specialist. I’ll arrange to hire one that you can trust.”

The fourth visitor of the day arrived at 11.00 on Saturday night, and managed to get past the nurses by showing an I.D. card and stating that he had urgent business. He was shown to Zalachenko’s room. The patient was still awake, and grumbling.

“My name is Jonas Sandberg,” he introduced himself, holding out a hand that Zalachenko ignored.

He was in his thirties. He had reddish-brown hair and was casually dressed in jeans, a checked shirt and a leather jacket. Zalachenko scrutinized him for fifteen seconds.

“I was wondering when one of you was going to show up.”

“I work for S.I.S., Swedish Internal Security,” Sandberg said, and showed Zalachenko his I.D.

“I doubt that,” said Zalachenko.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You may be employed by S.I.S., but I doubt that’s who you’re working for.”

Sandberg looked around the room, then he pulled up the visitor’s chair.

“I came here late so as not to attract attention. We’ve discussed how we can help you, and now we have to reach some sort of agreement about what’s going to happen. I’m just here to have your version of the story and find out what your intentions are… so that we can work out a common strategy.”

“What sort of strategy had you in mind?”

“Herr Zalachenko… I’m afraid that a process has been set in motion in which the deleterious effects are hard to foresee,” Sandberg said. “We’ve talked it through. It’s going to be difficult to explain away the grave in Gosseberga, and the fact that the girl was shot three times. But let’s not lose hope altogether. The conflict between you and your daughter can explain your fear of her and why you took such drastic measures… but I’m afraid we’re talking about your doing some time in prison.”

Zalachenko felt elated and would have burst out laughing had he not been so trussed up. He managed a slight curl of his lips. Anything more would be just too painful.

“So that’s our strategy?”

“Herr Zalachenko, you are aware of the concept of damage control. We have to arrive at a common strategy. We’ll do everything in our power to assist you with a lawyer and so on… but we need your cooperation, as well as certain guarantees.”

“You’ll get only one guarantee from me. First, you will see to it that all this disappears.” He waved his hand. “Niedermann is the scapegoat and I guarantee that no-one will ever find him.”

“There’s forensic evidence that –”

“Fuck the forensic evidence. It’s a matter of how the investigation is carried out and how the facts are presented. My guarantee is this… if you don’t wave your magic wand and make all this disappear, I’m inviting the media to a press conference. I know names, dates, events. I don’t think I need to remind you who I am.”

“You don’t understand –”

“I understand perfectly. You’re an errand boy. So go to your superior and tell him what I’ve said. He’ll understand. Tell him that I have copies of… everything. I can take you all down.”

“We have to come to an agreement.”

“This conversation is over. Get out of here. And tell them that next time they should send a grown man for me to discuss things with.”

Zalachenko turned his head away from his visitor. Sandberg looked at Zalachenko for a moment. Then he shrugged and got up. He was almost at the door when he heard Zalachenko’s voice again.

“One more thing.”

Sandberg turned.

“Salander.”

“What about her?”

“She has to disappear.”

“How do you mean?”

Sandberg looked so nervous for a second that Zalachenko had to smile, although the pain drilled into his jaw.

“I see that you milksops are too sensitive to kill her, and that you don’t even have the resources to have it done. Who would do it… you? But she has to disappear. Her testimony has to be declared invalid. She has to be committed to a mental institution for life.”

Salander heard footsteps in the corridor. She had never heard those footsteps before.

Her door had been open all evening and the nurses had been in to check on her every ten minutes. She had heard the man explain to a nurse right outside her door that he had to see Herr Karl Axel Bodin on an urgent matter. She had heard him offering his I.D., but no words were exchanged that gave her any clue as to who he was or what sort of I.D. he had.

The nurse had asked him to wait while she went to see whether Herr Bodin was awake. Salander concluded that his I.D., whatever it said, must have been persuasive.

She heard the nurse go down the corridor to the left. It took her 17 steps to reach the room, and the male visitor took 14 steps to cover the same distance. That gave an average of 15.5 steps. She estimated the length of a step at 60 centimetres, which multiplied by 15.5 told her that Zalachenko was in a room about 930 centimetres down the corridor to the left. O.K., approximately ten metres. She estimated that the width of her room was about five metres, which should mean that Zalachenko’s room was two doors down from hers.

According to the green numerals on the digital clock on her bedside cabinet, the visit lasted precisely nine minutes.

Zalachenko lay awake for a long time after the man who called himself Jonas Sandberg had left. He assumed that it was not his real name; in his experience Swedish amateur spies had a real obsession with using false names even when it was not in the least bit necessary. In which case Sandberg, or whatever the hell his name was, was the first indication that Zalachenko’s predicament had come to the attention of the Section. Considering the media attention, this would have been hard to avoid. But the visit did confirm that his predicament was a matter of anxiety to them. As well it might be.

He weighed the pros and cons, lined up the possibilities, and rejected various options. He was fully aware that everything had gone about as badly as it could have. In a well-ordered world he would be at home in Gosseberga now, Niedermann would be safely out of the country, and Salander would be buried in a hole in the ground. Despite the fact that he had a reasonable grasp of what had happened, for the life of him he could not comprehend how she had managed to dig herself out of Niedermann’s trench, make her way to his farm, and damn near destroy him with two blows of an axe. She was extraordinarily resourceful.

On the other hand he understood quite well what had happened to Niedermann, and why he had run for his life instead of staying to finish Salander off. He knew that something was not quite right in Niedermann’s head, that he saw visions – ghosts even. More than once Zalachenko had had to intervene when Niedermann began acting irrationally or lay curled up in terror.

This worried Zalachenko. He was convinced that, since Niedermann had not yet been captured, he must have been acting rationally during the twenty-four hours since his flight from Gosseberga. Probably he would go to Tallinn, where he would seek protection among contacts in Zalachenko’s criminal empire. What worried him in the short term was that he could never predict when Niedermann might be struck by his mental paralysis. If it happened while he was trying to escape, he would make mistakes, and if he made mistakes he would end up in prison. He would never surrender voluntarily, which meant that policemen would die and Niedermann probably would as well.

This thought upset Zalachenko. He did not want Niedermann to die. Niedermann was his son. But regrettable as it was, Niedermann must not be captured alive. He had never been arrested, and Zalachenko could not predict how he would react under interrogation. He doubted that Niedermann would be able to keep quiet, as he should. So it would be a good thing if he were killed by the police. He would grieve for his son, but the alternative was worse. If Niedermann talked, Zalachenko himself would have to spend the rest of his life in prison.

But it was now forty-eight hours since Niedermann had fled, and he had not yet been caught. That was good. It was an indication that Niedermann was functioning, and a functioning Niedermann was invincible.

In the long term there was another worry. He wondered how Niedermann would get along on his own, without his father there to guide him. Over the years he had noticed that if he stopped giving instructions or gave Niedermann too much latitude to make his own decisions, he would slip into an indolent state of indecision.

Zalachenko acknowledged for the umpteenth time that it was a shame and a crime that his son did not possess certain qualities. Ronald Niedermann was without doubt a very talented person who had physical attributes to make him a formidable and feared individual. He was also an excellent and cold-blooded organizer. His problem was that he utterly lacked the instinct to lead. He always needed somebody to tell him what he was supposed to be organizing.

But for the time being all this lay outside Zalachenko’s control. Right now he had to focus on himself. His situation was precarious, perhaps more precarious than ever before.

He did not think that Advokat Thomasson’s visit earlier in the day had been particularly reassuring. Thomasson was and remained a corporate lawyer, and no matter how effective he was in that respect, he would not be a great support in this other business.

And then there had been the visit of Jonas Sandberg, or whatever his name was. Sandberg offered a considerably stronger lifeline. But that lifeline could also be a trap. He had to play his cards right, and he would have to take control of the situation. Control was everything.

In the end he had his own resources to fall back on. For the moment he needed medical attention, but in a couple of days, maybe a week, he would have regained his strength. If things came to a head, he might have only himself to rely on. That meant that he would have to disappear, from right under the noses of the policemen circling around him. He would need a hideout, a passport, and some cash. Thomasson could provide him with all that. But first he would have to get strong enough to make his escape.

At 1.00 a.m. the night nurse looked in. He pretended to be asleep. When she closed the door he arduously sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. He sat still for while, testing his sense of balance. Then he cautiously put his left foot down on the floor. Luckily the axe blow had struck his already crippled right leg. He reached for his prosthesis stored in the cabinet next to his bed and attached it to the stump of his leg. Then he stood up, keeping his weight on his uninjured leg before trying to stand on the other. As he shifted his weight a sharp pain shot through his right leg.

He gritted his teeth and took a step. He would need crutches, and he was sure that the hospital would offer him some soon. He braced himself against the wall and limped over to the door. It took him several minutes, and he had to stop after each step to deal with the pain.

He rested on one leg as he pushed open the door a crack and peered out into the corridor. He did not see anyone, so he stuck his head out a little further. He heard faint voices to the left and turned to look. The night nurses were at their station about twenty metres down on the other side of the corridor.

He turned his head to the right and saw the exit at the other end.

Earlier in the day he had enquired about Lisbeth Salander’s condition. He was, after all, her father. The nurses obviously had been instructed not to discuss other patients. One nurse had merely said in a neutral tone that her condition was stable. But she had unconsciously glanced to her left.

In one of the rooms between his own and the exit was Lisbeth Salander.

He carefully closed the door, limped back to the bed, and detached his prosthesis. He was drenched in sweat when he finally slipped under the covers.

Inspector Holmberg returned to Stockholm at lunchtime on Sunday. He was hungry and exhausted. He took the tunnelbana to City Hall, walked to police headquarters on Bergsgatan, and went up to Inspector Bublanski’s office. Modig and Andersson had already arrived. Bublanski had called the meeting on Sunday because he knew that preliminary investigation leader Richard Ekström was busy elsewhere.

“Thanks for coming in,” said Bublanski. “I think it’s time we had a discussion in peace and quiet to try to make sense of this mess. Jerker, have you got anything new?”

“Nothing I haven’t already told you on the phone. Zalachenko isn’t budging one millimetre. He’s innocent of everything and has nothing to say. Just that –”

“Yes?”

“Sonja, you were right. He’s one of the nastiest people I’ve ever met. It might sound stupid to say that. Policemen aren’t supposed to think in those terms, but there’s something really scary beneath his calculating facade.”

“O.K.” Bublanski cleared his throat. “What have we got? Sonja?”

She smiled weakly.

“The private investigators won this round. I can’t find Zalachenko in any public register, but a Karl Axel Bodin seems to have been born in 1942 in Uddevalla. His parents were Marianne and Georg Bodin. They died in an accident in 1946. Karl Axel Bodin was brought up by an uncle living in Norway. So there is no record of him until the ’70s, when he moved back to Sweden. Mikael Blomkvist’s story that he’s a G.R.U. agent who defected from the Soviet Union seems impossible to verify, but I’m inclined to think he’s right.”

“Alright. And what does that mean?”

“The obvious explanation is that he was given a false identity. It must have been done with the consent of the authorities.”

“You mean the Security Police, Säpo?”

“That’s what Blomkvist claims. But exactly how it was done I don’t know. It presupposes that his birth certificate and a number of other documents were falsified and then slipped into our public records. I don’t dare to comment on the legal ramifications of such an action. It probably depends on who made the decision. But for it to be legal, the decision would have to have been made at senior government level.”

Silence descended in Bublanski’s office as the four criminal inspectors considered these implications.

“O.K.,” said Bublanski. “The four of us are just dumb police officers. If people in government are mixed up in this, I don’t intend to interrogate them.”

“Hmm,” said Andersson, “this could lead to a constitutional crisis. In the United States you can cross-examine members of the government in a normal court of law. In Sweden you have to do it through a constitutional committee.”

“But we could ask the boss,” said Holmberg.

“Ask the boss?” said Bublanski.

“Thorbjörn Fälldin. He was Prime Minister at the time.”

“O.K., we’ll just cruise up to wherever he lives and ask the former Prime Minister if he faked identity documents for a defecting Russian spy. I don’t think so.”

“Fälldin lives in Ås, in Härnösand. I grew up a few miles from there. My father’s a member of the Centre Party and knows Fälldin well. I’ve met him several times, both as a kid and as an adult. He’s a very approachable person.”

Three inspectors gave Holmberg an astonished look.

“You know Fälldin?” Bublanski said dubiously.

Holmberg nodded. Bublanski pursed his lips.

“To tell the truth,” said Holmberg, “it would solve a number of issues if we could get the former Prime Minister to give us a statement – at least we’d know where we stand in all this. I could go up there and talk to him. If he won’t say anything, so be it. But if he does, we might save ourselves a lot of time.”

Bublanski weighed the suggestion. Then he shook his head. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that both Modig and Andersson were nodding thoughtfully.

“Holmberg… it’s nice of you to offer, but I think we’ll put that idea on the back burner for now. So, back to the case. Sonja.”

“According to Blomkvist, Zalachenko came here in 1976. As far as I can work out, there’s only one person he could have got that information from.”

“Gunnar Björck,” said Andersson.

“What has Björck told us?” Holmberg asked.

“Not much. He says it’s all classified and that he can’t discuss anything without permission from his superiors.”

“And who are his superiors?”

“He won’t say.”

“So what’s going to happen to him?”

“I arrested him for violation of the prostitution laws. We have excellent documentation in Dag Svensson’s notes. Ekström was most upset, but since I had already filed a report, he could get himself into trouble if he closes the preliminary investigation,” Andersson said.

“I see. Violation of the prostitution laws. That might result in a fine of ten times his daily income.”

“Probably. But we have him in the system and can call him in again for questioning.”

“But now we’re getting a little too close to poaching on Säpo’s preserves. That might cause a bit of turbulence.”

“The problem is that none of this could have happened if Säpo weren’t involved somehow. It’s possible that Zalachenko really was a Russian spy who defected and was granted political asylum. It’s also possible that he worked for Säpo as an expert or source or whatever title you want to give him, and that there was good reason to offer him a false identity and anonymity. But there are three problems. First, the investigation carried out in 1991 that led to Lisbeth Salander being locked away was illegal. Second, Zalachenko’s activities since then have nothing whatsoever to do with national security. Zalachenko is an ordinary gangster who’s probably mixed up in several murders and other criminal activities. And third, there is no doubt that Lisbeth Salander was shot and buried alive on his property in Gosseberga.”

“Speaking of which, I’d really like to read the infamous report,” said Holmberg.

Bublanski’s face clouded over.

“Jerker… this is how it is: Ekström laid claim to it on Friday, and when I asked for it back he said he’d make me a copy, which he never did. Instead he called me and said that he had spoken with the Prosecutor General and there was a problem. According to the P.G., the Top Secret classification means that the report may not be disseminated or copied. The P.G. has called in all copies until the matter is investigated. Which meant that Sonja had to relinquish the copy she had too.”

“So we no longer have the report?”

“No.”

“Damn,” said Holmberg. “The whole thing stinks.”

“I know,” said Bublanski. “Worst of all, it means that someone is acting against us, and acting very quickly and efficiently. The report was what finally put us on the right track.”

“So we have to work out who’s acting against us,” said Holmberg.

“Just a moment,” said Modig. “We also have Peter Teleborian. He contributed to our investigation by profiling Lisbeth Salander.”

“Exactly,” said Bublanski in a darker tone of voice. “And what did he say?”

“He was very concerned about her safety and wished her well. But when the discussion was over, he said that she was lethally dangerous and might well resist arrest. We based a lot of our thinking on what he told us.”

“And he got Hans Faste all worked up,” said Holmberg. “Have we heard anything from Faste, by the way?”

“He took some time off,” Bublanski replied curtly. “The question now is how we should proceed.”

They spent the next two hours discussing their options. The only practical decision they made was that Modig should return to Göteborg the next day to see whether Salander had anything to say. When they finally broke up, Modig and Andersson walked together down to the garage.

“I was just thinking…” Andersson stopped.

“Yes?”

“It’s just that when we talked to Teleborian, you were the only one in the group who offered any opposition when he answered our questions.”

“Yes?”

“Well… er… good instincts,” he said.

Andersson was not known for handing out praise, and it was definitely the first time he had ever said anything positive or encouraging to Modig. He left her standing by her car in astonishment.

CHAPTER 5

Blomkvist had spent Saturday night with Berger. They lay in bed and talked through the details of the Zalachenko story. Blomkvist trusted Berger implicitly and was never for a second inhibited by the fact that she was going to be working for a rival paper. Nor had Berger any thought of taking the story with her. It was Millennium’s scoop, even though she may have felt a certain frustration that she was not going to be the editor of that particular issue. It would have been a fine ending to her years at Millennium.

They also discussed the future structure of the magazine. Berger was determined to retain her shareholding in Millennium and to remain on the board, even if she had no say over the magazine’s contents.

“Give me a few years at the daily and then, who knows? Maybe I’ll come back to Millennium before I retire,” she said.

And as for their own complicated relationship, why should it be any different? Except that of course they would not be meeting so often. It would be as it was in the ’80s, before Millennium was founded and when they worked in separate offices.

“I imagine we’ll have to book appointments with each other,” Berger said with a faint smile.

On Sunday morning they said a hasty goodbye before Berger drove home to her husband, Greger Beckman.

After she was gone Blomkvist called the hospital in Sahlgrenska and tried to get some information about Salander’s condition. Nobody would tell him anything, so finally he called Inspector Erlander, who took pity on him and vouchsafed that, given the circumstances, Salander’s condition was fair and the doctors were cautiously optimistic. He asked if he would be able to visit her. Erlander told him that Salander was officially under arrest and that the prosecutor would not allow any visitors, but in any case she was in no condition to be questioned. Erlander said he would call if her condition took a turn for the worse.

When Blomkvist checked his mobile, he saw that he had forty-two messages and texts, almost all of them from journalists. There had been wild speculation in the media after it was revealed that Blomkvist was the one who had found Salander, and had probably saved her life. He was obviously closely connected with the development of events.

He deleted all the messages from reporters and called his sister, Annika, to invite himself for Sunday lunch. Then he called Dragan Armansky, C.E.O. of Milton Security, who was at his home in Lidingö.

“You certainly have a way with headlines,” Armansky said.

“I tried to reach you earlier this week. I got a message that you were looking for me, but I just didn’t have time –”

“We’ve been doing our own investigation at Milton. And I understood from Holger Palmgren that you had some information. But it seems you were far ahead of us.”

Blomkvist hesitated before he said: “Can I trust you?”

“How do you mean exactly?”

“Are you on Salander’s side or not? Can I believe that you want the best for her?”

“I’m her friend. Although, as you know, that’s not necessarily the same thing as saying that she’s my friend.”

“I understand that. But what I’m asking is whether or not you’re willing to put yourself in her corner and get into a pitched battle with her enemies.”

“I’m on her side,” he said.

“Can I share information with you and discuss things with you without the risk of your leaking it to the police or to anyone else?”

“I can’t get involved in criminal activity,” Armansky said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You can absolutely rely on me as long as you don’t reveal that you’re engaged in any sort of criminal activity.”

“Good enough. We need to meet.”

“I’m coming into the city this evening. Dinner?”

“I don’t have time today, but I’d be grateful if we could meet tomorrow night. You and I and perhaps a few other people might need to sit down for a chat.”

“You’re welcome at Milton. Shall we say 6.00?”

“One more thing… I’m seeing my sister, the lawyer Annika Giannini, later this morning. She’s considering taking on Salander as a client, but she can’t work for nothing. I can pay part of her fee out of my own pocket. Would Milton Security be willing to contribute?”

“That girl is going to need a damned good criminal lawyer. Your sister might not be the best choice, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. I’ve already talked to Milton’s chief lawyer and he’s looking into it. I was thinking of Peter Althin or someone like that.”

“That would be a mistake. Salander needs a totally different kind of legal support. You’ll see what I mean when we talk. But would you be willing, in principle, to help?”

“I’d already decided that Milton ought to hire a lawyer for her –”

“Is that a yes or a no? I know what happened to her. I know roughly what’s behind it all. And I have a strategy.”

Armansky laughed.

“O.K. I’ll listen to what you have to say. If I like it, I’m in.”

Blomkvist kissed his sister on the cheek and immediately asked: “Are you going to be representing Lisbeth Salander?”

“I’m going to have to say no. You know I’m not a criminal lawyer. Even if she’s acquitted of murder, there’s going to be a rack of other charges. She’s going to need someone with a completely different sort of clout and experience than I have.”

“You’re wrong. You’re a lawyer and you’re a recognized authority in women’s rights. In my considered view you’re precisely the lawyer she needs.”

“Mikael… I don’t think you really appreciate what this involves. It’s a complex criminal case, not a straightforward case of sexual harassment or of violence against a woman. If I take on her defence, it could turn out to be a disaster.”

Blomkvist smiled. “You’re missing the point. If she had been charged with the murders of Dag and Mia, for example, I would have gone for the Silbersky type or another of the heavy-duty criminal lawyers. But this trial is going to be about entirely different things.”

“I think you’d better explain.”

They talked for almost two hours over sandwiches and coffee. By the time Mikael had finished his account, Annika had been persuaded. Mikael picked up his mobile and made another call to Inspector Erlander in Göteborg.

“Hello, it’s Blomkvist again.”

“I don’t have any news on Salander,” Erlander said, plainly irritated.

“Which I assume is good news. But I actually have some news.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, she now has a lawyer named Annika Giannini. She’s with me right now, so I’ll put her on.”

Blomkvist handed the mobile across the table.

“My name is Annika Giannini and I’ve been taken on to represent Lisbeth Salander. I need to get in touch with my client so that she can approve me as her defence lawyer. And I need the telephone number of the prosecutor.”

“As far as I know,” Erlander said, “a public defence has already been appointed.”

“That’s nice to hear. Did anyone ask Lisbeth Salander her opinion?”

“Quite frankly… we haven’t had the opportunity to speak with her yet. We hope to be able to do so tomorrow, if she’s well enough.”

“Fine. Then I’ll tell you here and now that until Fröken Salander says otherwise, you may regard me as her legal representative. You may not question her unless I am present. You can say hello to her and ask her whether she accepts me as her lawyer or not. But that is all. Is that understood?”

“Yes,” Erlander said with an audible sigh. He was not entirely sure what the letter of the law was on this point. “Our number one objective is to discover if she has any information as to where Ronald Niedermann might be. Is it O.K. to ask her about that… even if you’re not present?”

“That’s fine… you may ask her questions relating to the police hunt for Niedermann. But you may not ask her any questions relating to any possible charges against her. Agreed?”

“I think so, yes.”

Inspector Erlander got up from his desk and went upstairs to tell the preliminary investigation leader, Agneta Jervas, about his conversation with Giannini.

“She was obviously hired by Blomkvist. I can’t believe Salander knows anything about it.”

“Giannini works in women’s rights. I heard her lecture once. She’s sharp, but completely unsuitable for this case.”

“It’s up to Salander to decide.”

“I might have to contest the decision in court… For the girl’s own sake she has to have a proper defence, and not some celebrity chasing headlines. Hmm. Salander has also been declared legally incompetent. I don’t know whether that affects things.”

“What should we do?”

Jervas thought for a moment. “This is a complete mess. I don’t know who’s going to be in charge of this case or if it’ll be transferred to Ekström in Stockholm. In any event she has to have a lawyer. O.K… ask her if she wants Giannini.”

When Blomkvist reached home at 5.00 in the afternoon he turned on his iBook and took up the thread of the text he had begun writing at the hotel in Göteborg. When he had worked for seven straight hours, he had identified the most glaring holes in the story. There was still much research to be done. One question he could not answer – based on the existing documentation – was who in Säpo, apart from Gunnar Björck, had conspired to lock Salander away in the asylum. Nor had he got to the heart of the relationship between Björck and the psychiatrist Peter Teleborian.

Finally he shut down the computer and went to bed. He felt as soon as he lay down that for the first time in weeks he could relax and sleep peacefully. The story was under control. No matter how many questions remained unanswered, he already had enough material to set off a landslide of headlines.

Late as it was, he picked up the telephone to call Berger and update her. And then he remembered that she had left Millennium. Suddenly he found it difficult to sleep.

A man carrying a brown briefcase stepped carefully down from the 7.30 p.m. train at Stockholm Central Station. He stood for a moment in the sea of travellers, getting his bearings. He had started out from Laholm just after 8.00 in the morning. He stopped in Göteborg to have lunch with an old friend before resuming his journey to Stockholm. He had not been to Stockholm for two years. In fact he had not planned to visit the capital ever again. Even though he had lived there for large parts of his working life, he always felt a little out of place in Stockholm, a feeling that had grown stronger with every visit he made since his retirement.

He walked slowly through the station, bought the evening papers and two bananas at Pressbyrån, and paused to watch two Muslim women in veils hurry past him. He had nothing against women in veils. It was nothing to him if people wanted to dress up in costume. But he was bothered by the fact that they had to dress like that in the middle of Stockholm. In his opinion, Somalia was a much better place for that sort of attire.

He walked the three hundred metres to Frey’s Hotel next to the old post office on Vasagatan. That was where he had stayed on previous visits. The hotel was centrally located and clean. And it was inexpensive, which was a factor since he was paying for the journey himself. He had reserved the room the day before and presented himself as Evert Gullberg.

When he got up to the room he went straight to the bathroom. He had reached the age when he had to use the toilet rather often. It was several years since he had slept through a whole night.

When he had finished he took off his hat, a narrow-brimmed, dark-green English felt hat, and loosened his tie. He was one metre eighty-four tall and weighed sixty-eight kilos, which meant he was thin and wiry. He wore a hound’s-tooth jacket and dark-grey trousers. He opened the brown briefcase and unpacked two shirts, a second tie, and underwear, which he arranged in the chest of drawers. Then he hung his overcoat and jacket in the wardrobe behind the door.

It was too early to go to bed. It was too late to bother going for an evening walk, something he might not enjoy in any case. He sat down in the obligatory chair in the hotel room and looked around. He switched on the T.V. and turned down the volume so that he would not have to hear it. He thought about calling reception and ordering coffee, but decided it was too late. Instead he opened the mini-bar and poured a miniature of Johnny Walker into a glass, and added very little water. He opened the evening papers and read everything that had been written that day about the search for Ronald Niedermann and the case of Lisbeth Salander. After a while he took out a leather-bound notebook and made some notes.

Gullberg, formerly Senior Administrative Officer at the Security Police, was now seventy-eight years old and had been retired for thirteen years. But intelligence officers never really retire, they just slip into the shadows.

After the war, when Gullberg was nineteen years old, he had joined the navy. He did his military service first as an officer cadet and was then accepted for officer training. But instead of the usual assignment at sea that he had anticipated, he was sent to Karlskrona as a signal tracker in the navy’s intelligence service. He had no difficulty with the work, which was mostly figuring out what was going on on the other side of the Baltic. But he found it dull and uninteresting. Through the service’s language school, however, he did learn Russian and Polish. These linguistic skills were one of the reasons he was recruited by the Security Police in 1950, during the time when the impeccably mannered Georg Thulin was head of the third division of Säpo. When he started, the total budget of the secret police was 2.7 million kronor for a staff of ninety-six people. When Gullberg formally retired in 1992, the budget of the Security Police was in excess of 350 million kronor, and he had no idea how many employees the Firm had.

Gullberg had spent his life on his majesty’s secret service, or perhaps more accurately in the secret service of the social-democratic welfare state. Which was an irony, since he had faithfully voted for the moderates in one election after another, except for 1991 when he deliberately voted against the moderates because he believed that Carl Bildt was a realpolitik catastrophe. He had voted instead for Ingvar Carlsson. The years of “Sweden’s best government” had also confirmed his worst fears. The moderate government had come to power when the Soviet Union was collapsing, and in his opinion no government had been less prepared to meet the new political opportunities emerging in the East, or to make use of the art of espionage. On the contrary, the Bildt government had cut back the Soviet desk for financial reasons and had at the same time got themselves involved in the international mess in Bosnia and Serbia – as if Serbia could ever threaten Sweden. The result was that a fabulous opportunity to plant long-term informants in Moscow had been lost. Some day, when relations would once again worsen – which according to Gullberg was inevitable – absurd demands would be made on the Security Police and the military intelligence service; they would be expected to wave their magic wand and summon up well-placed agents out of a bottle.

Gullberg had begun at the Russia desk of the third division of the state police, and after two years in the job had undertaken his first tentative field work in 1952 and 1953 as an Air Force attaché with the rank of captain at the embassy in Moscow. Strangely enough, he was following in the footsteps of another well-known spy. Some years earlier that post had been occupied by the notorious Colonel Wennerström.[1]

Back in Sweden, Gullberg had worked in Counter-Espionage, and ten years later he was one of the younger security police officers who, working under Otto Danielsson, exposed Wennerström and eventually got him a life sentence for treason at Långholmen prison.

When the Security Police was reorganized under Per Gunnar Vinge in 1964 and became the Security Division of the National Police Board, or Swedish Internal Security – S.I.S. – the major increase in personnel began. By then Gullberg had worked at the Security Police for fourteen years, and had become one of its trusted veterans.

Gullberg had never used the designation “Säpo” for Säkerhetspolisen, the Security Police. He used the term “S.I.S.” in official contexts, and among colleagues he would also refer to “the Company” or “the Firm,” or merely “the Division” – but never “Säpo”. The reason was simple. The Firm’s most important task for many years was so-called personnel control, that is, the investigation and registration of Swedish citizens who might be suspected of harbouring communist or subversive views. Within the Firm the terms communist and traitor were synonymous. The later conventional use of the term “Säpo” was actually something that the potentially subversive communist publication Clarté had coined as a pejorative name for the communist-hunters within the police force. For the life of him Gullberg could never imagine why his former boss P.G. Vinge had entitled his memoirs Säpo Chief 1962–1970.

It was the reorganization of 1964 that had shaped Gullberg’s future career.

The designation S.I.S. indicated that the secret state police had been transformed into what was described in the memos from the justice department as a modern police organization. This involved recruiting new personnel and continual problems breaking them in. In this expanding organization “the Enemy” were presented with dramatically improved opportunities to place agents within the division. This meant in turn that internal security had to be intensified – the Security Police could no longer be a club of former officers, where everyone knew everyone else, and where the commonest qualification for a new recruit was that his father was or had been an officer.

In 1963 Gullberg was transferred from Counter-Espionage to personnel control, a role that took on added significance in the wake of Wennerström’s exposure as a double agent. During that period the foundation was laid for the “register of political opinions,” a list which towards the end of the ’60s amounted to around 300,000 Swedish citizens who were held to harbour undesirable political sympathies. Checking the backgrounds of Swedish citizens was one thing, but the crucial question was: how would security control within S.I.S. itself be implemented?

The Wennerström debacle had given rise to an avalanche of dilemmas within the Security Police. If a colonel on the defence staff could work for the Russians – he was also the government’s adviser on matters involving nuclear weapons and security policy – it followed that the Russians might have an equally senior agent within the Security Police. Who would guarantee that the top ranks and middle management at the Firm were not working for the Russians? Who, in short, was going to spy on the spies?

In August 1964 Gullberg was summoned to an afternoon meeting with the assistant chief of the Security Police, Hans Wilhelm Francke. The other participants at the meeting were two individuals from the top echelon of the Firm, the assistant head of Secretariat and the head of Budget. Before the day was over, Gullberg had been appointed head of a newly created division with the working title of “the Special Section”. The first thing he did was to rename it “Special Analysis”. That held for a few minutes until the head of Budget pointed out that S.A. was not much better than S.S. The organization’s final name became “the Section for Special Analysis,” the S.S.A., and in daily parlance “the Section,” to differentiate it from “the Division” or “the Firm,” which referred to the Security Police as a whole.

“The Section” was Francke’s idea. He called it “the last line of defence”. An ultra-secret unit that was given strategic positions within the Firm, but which was invisible. It was never referred to in writing, even in budget memoranda, and therefore it could not be infiltrated. Its task was to watch over national security. He had the authority to make it happen. He needed the Budget chief and the Secretariat chief to create the hidden substructure, but they were old colleagues, friends from dozens of skirmishes with the Enemy.

During the first year the Section consisted of Gullberg and three hand-picked colleagues. Over the next ten years it grew to include no more than eleven people, of whom two were administrative secretaries of the old school and the remainder were professional spy hunters. It was a structure with only two ranks. Gullberg was the chief. He would ordinarily meet each member of his team every day. Efficiency was valued more highly than background.

Formally, Gullberg was subordinate to a line of people in the hierarchy under the head of Secretariat of the Security Police, to whom he had to deliver monthly reports, but in practice he had been given a unique position with exceptional powers. He, and he alone, could decide to put Säpo’s top bosses under the microscope. If he wanted to, he could even turn Per Gunnar Vinge’s life inside out. (Which he also did.) He could initiate his own investigations or carry out telephone tapping without having to justify his objective or even report it to a higher level. His model was the legendary James Jesus Angleton, who had a similar position in the C.I.A., and whom he came to know personally.

The Section became a micro-organization within the Division – outside, above, and parallel to the rest of the Security Police. This also had geographical consequences. The Section had its offices at Kungsholmen, but for security reasons almost the whole team was moved out of police headquarters to an eleven-room apartment in Östermalm that had been discreetly remodelled into a fortified office. It was staffed twenty-four hours a day since the faithful old retainer and secretary Eleanor Badenbrink was installed in permanent lodgings in two of its rooms closest to the entrance. Badenbrink was an implacable colleague in whom Gullberg had implicit trust.

In the organization, Gullberg and his employees disappeared from public view – they were financed through a special fund, but they did not exist anywhere in the formal structure of the Security Police, which reported to the police commission or the justice department. Not even the head of S.I.S. knew about the most secret of the secret, whose task it was to handle the most sensitive of the sensitive.

At the age of forty Gullberg consequently found himself in a situation where he did not have to explain his actions to any living soul and could initiate investigations of anyone he chose.

It was clear to Gullberg that the Section for Special Analysis could become a politically sensitive unit and the job description was expressly vague. The written record was meagre in the extreme. In September 1964, Prime Minister Erlander signed a directive that guaranteed the setting aside of funds for the Section for Special Analysis, which was understood to be essential to the nation’s security. This was one of twelve similar matters which the assistant chief of S.I.S., Hans Wilhelm Francke, brought up during an afternoon meeting. The document was stamped top secret and filed in the special protocol of S.I.S.

The signature of the Prime Minister meant that the Section was now a legally approved institution. The first year’s budget amounted to 52,000 kronor. That the budget was so low was a stroke of genius, Gullberg thought. It meant that the creation of the Section appeared to be just another routine matter.

In a broader sense, the signature of the Prime Minister meant that he had sanctioned the need for a unit that would be responsible for “internal personnel control”. At the same time it could be interpreted as the Prime Minister giving his approval to the establishment of a body that would also monitor particularly sensitive individuals outside S.I.S., such as the Prime Minister himself. It was this last which created potentially acute political problems.

Evert Gullberg saw that his whisky glass was empty. He was not fond of alcohol, but it had been a long day and a long journey. At this stage of life he did not think it mattered whether he decided to have one glass of whisky or two. He poured himself the miniature Glenfiddich.

The most sensitive of all issues, of course, was to be that of Olof Palme.[2]

Gullberg remembered every detail of Election Day 1976. For the first time in modern history, Sweden had voted for a conservative government. Most regrettably it was Thorbjörn Fälldin who became Prime Minister, not Gösta Bohman, a man infinitely better qualified. But above all, Palme was defeated, and for that Gullberg could breathe a sigh of relief.

Palme’s suitability as Prime Minister had been the object of more than one lunch conversation in the corridors of S.I.S. In 1969, Vinge had been dismissed from the service after he had given voice to the view, shared by many inside the Division, that Palme might be an agent of influence for the K.G.B. Vinge’s view was not even controversial in the climate prevailing inside the Firm. Unfortunately, he had openly discussed the matter with County Governor Lassinanti on a visit to Norrbotten. Lassinanti had been astonished and had informed the government chancellor, with the result that Vinge was summoned to explain himself at a one-on-one meeting.

To Gullberg’s frustration, the question of Palme’s possible Russian contacts was never resolved. Despite persistent attempts to establish the truth and uncover the crucial evidence – the smoking gun – the Section had never found any proof. In Gullberg’s eyes this did not mean that Palme might be innocent, but rather that he was an especially cunning and intelligent spy who was not tempted to make the same mistakes that other Soviet spies had made. Palme continued to baffle them, year after year. In 1982 the Palme question arose again when he became Prime Minister for the second time. Then the assassin’s shots rang out on Sveavägen and the matter became irrelevant.

1976 had been a problematic year for the Section. Within S.I.S. – among the few people who actually knew about the existence of the Section – a certain amount of criticism had surfaced. During the past ten years, sixty-five employees from within the Security Police had been dismissed from the organization on the grounds of presumed political unreliability. Most of the cases, however, were of the kind that were never going to be proven, and some very senior officers began to wonder whether the Section was not run by paranoid conspiracy theorists.

Gullberg still raged to recall the case of an officer hired by S.I.S. in 1968 whom he had personally evaluated as unsuitable. He was Inspector Bergling, a lieutenant in the Swedish army who later turned out to be a colonel in the Soviet military intelligence service, the G.R.U. On four separate occasions Gullberg tried to have Bergling removed, but each time his efforts were stymied. Things did not change until 1977, when Bergling became the object of suspicion outside the Section as well. His became the worst scandal in the history of the Swedish Security Police.

Criticism of the Section had increased during the first half of the seventies, and by mid-decade Gullberg had heard several proposals that the budget be reduced, and even suggestions that the operation was altogether unnecessary.

The criticism meant that the Section’s future was questioned. That year the threat of terrorism was made a priority in S.I.S. In terms of espionage it was a sad chapter in their history, dealing as they were mainly with confused youths flirting with Arab or pro-Palestinian elements. The big question within the Security Police was to what extent personnel control would be given special authority to investigate foreign citizens residing in Sweden, or whether this would go on being the preserve of the Immigration Division.

Out of this somewhat esoteric bureaucratic debate, a need had arisen for the Section to assign a trusted colleague to the operation who could reinforce its control, espionage in fact, against members of the Immigration Division.

The job fell to a young man who had worked at S.I.S. since 1970, and whose background and political loyalty made him eminently qualified to work alongside the officers in the Section. In his free time he was a member of an organization called the Democratic Alliance, which was described by the social-democratic media as extreme right-wing. Within the Section this was no obstacle. Three others were members of the Democratic Alliance too, and the Section had in fact been instrumental in the very formation of the group. It had also contributed a small part of its funding. It was through this organization that the young man was brought to the attention of the Section and recruited.

His name was Gunnar Björck.

It was an improbable stroke of luck that when Alexander Zalachenko walked into Norrmalm police station on Election Day 1976 and requested asylum, it was a junior officer called Gunnar Björck who received him in his capacity as administrator of the Immigration Division. An agent already connected to the most secret of the secret.

Björck recognized Zalachenko’s importance at once and broke off the interview to install the defector in a room at the Hotel Continental. It was Gullberg whom Björck notified when he sounded the alarm, and not his formal boss in the Immigration Division. The call came just as the voting booths had closed and all signs pointed to the fact that Palme was going to lose. Gullberg had just come home and was watching the election coverage on T.V. At first he was sceptical about the information that the excited young officer was telling him. Then he drove down to the Continental, not 250 metres from the hotel room where he found himself today, to assume control of the Zalachenko affair.

That night Gullberg’s life underwent a radical change. The notion of secrecy took on a whole new dimension. He saw immediately the need to create a new structure around the defector.

He decided to include Björck in the Zalachenko unit. It was a reasonable decision, since Björck already knew of Zalachenko’s existence. Better to have him on the inside than a security risk on the outside. Björck was moved from his post within the Immigration Division to a desk in the apartment in Östermalm.

In the drama that followed, Gullberg chose from the beginning to inform only one person in S.I.S., namely the head of Secretariat, who already had an overview of the activities of the Section. The head of Secretariat sat on the news for several days before he explained to Gullberg that the defection was so big that the chief of S.I.S. would have to be informed, as well as the government.

By that time the new chief of S.I.S. knew about the Section for Special Analysis, but he had only a vague idea of what the Section actually did. He had come on board recently to clean up the shambles of what was known as the Internal Bureau affair, and was already on his way to a higher position within the police hierarchy. The chief of S.I.S. had been told in a private conversation with the head of Secretariat that the Section was a secret unit appointed by the government. Its mandate put it outside regular operations, and no questions should be asked. Since this particular chief was a man who never asked questions that might yield unpleasant answers, he acquiesced. He accepted that there was something known only as S.S.A. and that he should have nothing more to do with the matter.

Gullberg was content to accept this situation. He issued instructions that required even the chief of S.I.S. not to discuss the topic in his office without taking special precautions. It was agreed that Zalachenko would be handled by the Section for Special Analysis.

The outgoing Prime Minister was certainly not to be informed. Because of the merry-go-round associated with a change of government, the incoming Prime Minister was fully occupied appointing ministers and negotiating with other conservative parties. It was not until a month after the government was formed that the chief of S.I.S., along with Gullberg, drove to Rosenbad to inform the incoming Prime Minister. Gullberg had objected to telling the government at all, but the chief of S.I.S. had stood his ground – it was constitutionally indefensible not to inform the Prime Minister. Gullberg used all his eloquence to convince the Prime Minister not to allow information about Zalachenko to pass beyond his own office – there was, he insisted, no need for the Foreign Minister, the Minister of Defence or any other member of the government to be informed.

It had upset Fälldin that an important Soviet agent had sought asylum in Sweden. The Prime Minister had begun to talk about how, for the sake of fairness, he would be obliged to take up the matter at least with the leaders of the other two parties in the coalition government. Gullberg was expecting this objection and played the strongest card he had available. He explained in a low voice that, if that happened, he would be forced to tender his resignation immediately. This was a threat that made an impression on Fälldin. It was intended to convey that the Prime Minister would bear the responsibility if the story ever got out and the Russians sent a death squad to liquidate Zalachenko. And if the person responsible for Zalachenko’s safety had seen fit to resign, such a revelation would be a political disaster for the Prime Minister.

Fälldin, still relatively unsure in his role, had acquiesced. He approved a directive that was immediately entered into the secret protocol, making the Section responsible for Zalachenko’s safety and debriefing. It also laid down that information about Zalachenko would not leave the Prime Minister’s office. By signing this directive, Fälldin had in practice demonstrated that he had been informed, but it also prevented him from ever discussing the matter. In short, he could forget about Zalachenko. But Fälldin had required that one person in his office, a hand-picked state secretary, should also be informed. He would function as a contact person in matters relating to the defector. Gullberg allowed himself to agree to this. He did not anticipate having any problem handling a state secretary.

The chief of S.I.S. was pleased. The Zalachenko matter was now constitutionally secured, which in this case meant that the chief had covered his back. Gullberg was pleased as well. He had managed to create a quarantine, which meant that he would be able to control the flow of information. He alone controlled Zalachenko.

When he got back to Östermalm he sat at his desk and wrote down a list of the people who knew about Zalachenko: himself, Björck, the operations chief of the Section Hans von Rottinger, Assistant Chief Fredrik Clinton, the Section’s secretary Eleanor Badenbrink, and two officers whose job it was to compile and analyse any intelligence information that Zalachenko might contribute. Seven individuals who over the coming years would constitute a special Section within the Section. He thought of them as the Inner Circle.

Outside the Section the information was known by the chief of S.I.S., the assistant chief, and the head of Secretariat. Besides them, the Prime Minister and a state secretary. A total of twelve. Never before had a secret of this magnitude been known to such a very small group.

Then Gullberg’s expression darkened. The secret was known also to a thirteenth person. Björck had been accompanied at Zalachenko’s original reception by a lawyer, Nils Erik Bjurman. To include Bjurman in the special Section would be out of the question. Bjurman was not a real security policeman – he was really no more than a trainee at S.I.S. – and he did not have the requisite experience or skills. Gullberg considered various alternatives and then chose to steer Bjurman carefully out of the picture. He used the threat of imprisonment for life, for treason, if Bjurman were to breathe so much as one syllable about Zalachenko, and at the same time he offered inducements, promises of future assignments, and finally he used flattery to bolster Bjurman’s feeling of importance. He arranged for Bjurman to be hired by a well-regarded law firm, who then provided him with a steady stream of assignments to keep him busy. The only problem was that Bjurman was such a mediocre lawyer that he was hardly capable of exploiting his opportunities. He left the firm after ten years and opened his own practice, which eventually became a law office at Odenplan.

Over the following years Gullberg kept Bjurman under discreet but regular surveillance. That was Björck’s job. It was not until the end of the ’80s that he stopped monitoring Bjurman, at which time the Soviet Union was heading for collapse and Zalachenko had ceased to be a priority.

For the Section, Zalachenko had at first been thought of as a potential breakthrough in the Palme mystery. Palme had accordingly been one of the first subjects that Gullberg discussed with him during the long debriefing.

The hopes for a breakthrough, however, were soon dashed, since Zalachenko had never operated in Sweden and had little knowledge of the country. On the other hand, Zalachenko had heard the rumour of a “Red Jumper,” a highly placed Swede – or possibly other Scandinavian politician – who worked for the K.G.B.

Gullberg drew up a list of names that were connected to Palme: Carl Lidbom, Pierre Schori, Sten Andersson, Marita Ulfskog, and a number of others. For the rest of his life, Gullberg would come back again and again to that list, but he never found an answer.

Gullberg was suddenly a big player: he was welcomed with respect in the exclusive club of selected warriors, all known to each other, where the contacts were made through personal friendship and trust, not through official channels and bureaucratic regulations. He met Angleton, and he got to drink whisky at a discreet club in London with the chief of M.I.6. He was one of the elite.

He was never going to be able to tell anyone about his triumphs, not even in posthumous memoirs. And there was the ever-present anxiety that the Enemy would notice his overseas journeys, that he might attract attention, that he might involuntarily lead the Russians to Zalachenko. In that respect Zalachenko was his worst enemy.

During the first year, the defector had lived in an anonymous apartment owned by the Section. He did not exist in any register or in any public document. Those within the Zalachenko unit thought they had plenty of time before they had to plan his future. Not until the spring of 1978 was he given a passport in the name of Karl Axel Bodin, along with a laboriously crafted personal history – a fictitious but verifiable background in Swedish records.

By that time it was already too late. Zalachenko had gone and fucked that stupid whore Agneta Sofia Salander, née Sjölander, and he had heedlessly told her his real name – Zalachenko. Gullberg began to believe that Zalachenko was not quite right in the head. He suspected that the Russian defector wanted to be exposed. It was as if he needed a platform. How else to explain the fact that he had been so fucking stupid.

There were whores, there were periods of excessive drinking, and there were incidents of violence and trouble with bouncers and others. On three occasions Zalachenko was arrested by the Swedish police for drunkenness and twice more in connection with fights in bars. Every time the Section had to intervene discreetly and bail him out, seeing to it that documents disappeared and records were altered. Gullberg assigned Björck to babysit the defector almost around the clock. It was not an easy job, but there was no alternative.

Everything could have gone fine. By the early ’80s Zalachenko had calmed down and begun to adapt. But he never gave up the whore Salander – and worse, he had become the father of Camilla and Lisbeth Salander.

Lisbeth Salander.

Gullberg pronounced the name with displeasure.

Ever since the girls were nine or ten, he had had a bad feeling about Lisbeth. He did not need a psychiatrist to tell him that she was not normal. Björck had reported that she was vicious and aggressive towards her father and that she seemed to be not in the least afraid of him. She did not say much, but she expressed in a thousand other ways her dissatisfaction with how things stood. She was a problem in the making, but how gigantic this problem would become was something Gullberg could never have imagined in his wildest dreams. What he most feared was that the situation in the Salander family would give rise to a social welfare report that named Zalachenko. Time and again he urged the man to cut his ties and disappear from their lives. Zalachenko would give his word, and then would always break it. He had other whores. He had plenty of whores. But after a few months he was always back with the Salander woman.

That bastard Zalachenko. An intelligence agent who let his cock rule any part of his life was obviously not a good intelligence agent. It was as though the man thought himself above all normal rules. If he could have screwed the whore without beating her up every time, that would have been one thing, but Zalachenko was guilty of repeated assault against his girlfriend. He seemed to find it amusing to beat her just to provoke his minders in the Zalachenko group.

Gullberg had no doubt that Zalachenko was a sick bastard, but he was in no position to pick and choose among defecting G.R.U. agents. He had only one, a man very aware of his value to Gullberg.

The Zalachenko unit had taken on the role of clean-up patrol in that sense. It was undeniable. Zalachenko knew that he could take liberties and that they would resolve whatever problems there might be. When it came to Agneta Sofia Salander, he exploited his hold over them to the maximum.

Not that there were not warnings. When Salander was twelve, she had stabbed Zalachenko. His wounds had not been life-threatening, but he was taken to St Göran’s hospital and the group had more of a mop-up job to do than ever. Gullberg then made it crystal clear to Zalachenko that he must never have any more dealings with the Salander family, and Zalachenko had given his promise. A promise he kept for more than six months before he turned up at Agneta Sofia Salander’s place and beat her so savagely that she ended up in a nursing home where she would be for the rest of her life.

That the Salander girl would go so far as to make a Molotov cocktail Gullberg had not foreseen. That day had been utter chaos. All manner of investigations loomed, and the future of the Zalachenko unit – of the whole Section even – had hung by a thread. If Salander talked, Zalachenko’s cover was at risk, and if that were to happen a number of operations put in place across Europe over the past fifteen years might have to be dismantled. Furthermore, there was a possibility that the Section would be subjected to official scrutiny, and that had to be prevented at all costs.

Gullberg had been consumed with worry. If the Section’s archives were opened, a number of practices would be revealed that were not always consistent with the dictates of the constitution, not to mention their years of investigations of Palme and other prominent Social Democrats. Just a few years after Palme’s assassination that was still a sensitive issue. Prosecution of Gullberg and several other employees of the Section would inevitably follow. Worse, as like as not, some ambitious scribbler would float the theory that the Section was behind the assassination of Palme, and that in turn would lead to even more damaging speculation and perhaps yet more insistent investigation. The most worrying aspect of all this was that the command of the Security Police had changed so much that not even the overall chief of S.I.S. now knew about the existence of the Section. All contacts with S.I.S. stopped at the desk of the new assistant chief of Secretariat, and he had been on the staff of the Section for ten years.

A mood of acute panic, even fear, overtook the unit. It was in fact Björck who had proposed the solution. Peter Teleborian, a psychiatrist, had become associated with S.I.S.’s department of Counter-Espionage in a quite different case. He had been key as a consultant in connection with Counter-Espionage’s surveillance of a suspected industrial spy. At a critical stage of the investigation they needed to know how the person in question might react if subjected to a great deal of stress. Teleborian had offered concrete, definite advice. In the event, S.I.S. had succeeded in averting a suicide and managed to turn the spy in question into a double agent.

After Salander’s attack on Zalachenko, Björck had surreptitiously engaged Teleborian as an outside consultant to the Section.

The solution to the problem had been very simple. Karl Axel Bodin would disappear into rehabilitative custody. Agneta Sofia Salander would necessarily disappear into an institution for long-term care. All the police reports on the case were collected up at S.I.S. and transferred by way of the assistant head of Secretariat to the Section.

Teleborian was assistant head physician at St Stefan’s psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala. All that was needed was a legal psychiatric report, which Björck and Teleborian drafted together, and then a brief and, as it turned out, uncontested decision in a district court. It was a question only of how the case was presented. The constitution had nothing to do with it. It was, after all, a matter of national security.

Besides, it was surely pretty obvious that Salander was insane. A few years in an institution would do her nothing but good. Gullberg had approved the operation.

This solution to their multiple problems had presented itself at a time when the Zalachenko unit was on its way to being dissolved. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist and Zalachenko’s usefulness was definitively on the wane.

The unit had procured a generous severance package from Security Police funds. They had arranged for him to have the best rehabilitative care, and after six months they had put him on a flight to Spain. From that moment on, they had made it clear to him that Zalachenko and the Section were going their separate ways. It had been one of Gullberg’s last responsibilities. One week later he had reached retirement age and handed over to his chosen successor, Fredrik Clinton. Thereafter Gullberg acted only as an adviser in especially sensitive matters. He had stayed in Stockholm for another three years and worked almost daily at the Section, but the number of his assignments decreased, and gradually he disengaged himself. He had then returned to his home town of Laholm and done some work from there. At first he had travelled frequently to Stockholm, but he made these journeys less and less often, and eventually not at all.

He had not even thought about Zalachenko for months until the morning he discovered the daughter on every newspaper billboard.

Gullberg followed the story in a state of awful confusion. It was no accident, of course, that Bjurman had been Salander’s guardian; on the other hand he could not see why the old Zalachenko story should surface. Salander was obviously deranged, so it was no surprise that she had killed these people, but that Zalachenko might have any connection to the affair had not dawned on him. The daughter would sooner or later be captured and that would be the end of it. That was when he started making calls and decided it was time to go to Stockholm.

The Section was faced with its worst crisis since the day he had created it.

Zalachenko dragged himself to the toilet. Now that he had crutches, he could move around his room. On Sunday he forced himself through short, sharp training sessions. The pain in his jaw was still excruciating and he could manage only liquid food, but he could get out of his bed and begin to make himself mobile. Having lived so long with a prosthesis he was used enough to crutches. He practised moving noiselessly on them, manoeuvring back and forth around his bed. Every time his right foot touched the floor, a terrible pain shot up his leg.

He gritted his teeth. He thought about the fact that his daughter was very close by. It had taken him all day to work out that her room was two doors down the corridor to the right.

The night nurse had been gone ten minutes, everything was quiet, it was 2.00 in the morning. Zalachenko laboriously got up and fumbled for his crutches. He listened at the door, but heard nothing. He pulled open the door and went into the corridor. He heard faint music from the nurses’ station. He made his way to the end of the corridor, pushed open the door, and looked into the empty landing where the lifts were. Going back down the corridor, he stopped at the door to his daughter’s room and rested there on his crutches for half a minute, listening.

Salander opened her eyes when she heard a scraping sound. It was as though someone was dragging something along the corridor. For a moment there was only silence, and she wondered if she were imagining things. Then she heard the same sound again, moving away. Her uneasiness grew.

Zalachenko was out there somewhere.

She felt fettered to her bed. Her skin itched under the neck brace. She felt an intense desire to move, to get up. Gradually she succeeded in sitting up. That was all she could manage. She sank back on to the pillow.

She ran her hand over the neck brace and located the fastenings that held it in place. She opened them and dropped the brace to the floor. Immediately it was easier to breathe.

What she wanted more than anything was a weapon, and to have the strength to get up and finish the job once and for all.

With difficulty she propped herself up, switched on the night light and looked around the room. She could see nothing that would serve her purpose. Then her eyes fell on a nurses’ table by the wall three metres from her bed. Someone had left a pencil there.

She waited until the night nurse had been and gone, which tonight she seemed to be doing about every half hour. Presumably the reduced frequency of the nurse’s visits meant that the doctors had decided her condition had improved; over the weekend the nurses had checked on her at least once every fifteen minutes. For herself, she could hardly notice any difference.

When she was alone she gathered her strength, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She had electrodes taped to her body to record her pulse and breathing, but the wires stretched in the direction of the pencil. She put her weight on her feet and stood up. Suddenly she swayed, off balance. For a second she felt as though she would faint, but she steadied herself against the bedhead and concentrated her gaze on the table in front of her. She took small, wobbly steps, reached out and grabbed the pencil.

Then she retreated slowly to the bed. She was exhausted.

After a while she managed to pull the sheet and blanket up to her chin. She studied the pencil. It was a plain wooden pencil, newly sharpened. It would make a passable weapon – for stabbing a face or an eye.

She laid it next to her hip and fell asleep.

CHAPTER 6

Blomkvist got up just after 9.00 and called Eriksson at Millennium.

“Good morning, editor-in-chief,” he said.

“I’m still in shock that Erika is gone and you want me to take her place. I can’t believe she’s gone already. Her office is empty.”

“Then it would probably be a good idea to spend the day moving in there.”

“I feel extremely self-conscious.”

“Don’t be. Everyone agrees that you’re the best choice. And if need be you can always come to me or Christer.”

“Thank you for your trust in me.”

“You’ve earned it,” Blomkvist said. “Just keep working the way you always do. We’ll deal with any problems as and when they crop up.”

He told her he was going to be at home all day writing. Eriksson realized that he was reporting in to her the way he had with Berger.

“O.K. Is there anything you want us to do?”

“No. On the contrary… if you have any instructions for me, just call. I’m still on the Salander story, trying to find out what’s happening there, but for everything else to do with the magazine, the ball’s in your court. You make the decisions. You’ll have my support if you need it.”

“And what if I make a wrong decision?”

“If I see or hear anything out of the ordinary, we’ll talk it through. But it would have to be something very unusual. Generally there aren’t any decisions that are 100 per cent right or wrong. You’ll make your decisions, and they might not be the same ones Erika would have made. If I were to make the decisions they would be different again, but your decisions are the ones that count.”

“Alright.”

“If you’re a good leader then you’ll discuss any concerns with the others. First with Henry and Christer, then with me, and we’ll raise any awkward problems at the editorial meetings.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Good luck.”

He sat down on the sofa in the living room with his iBook on his lap and worked without any breaks all day. When he was finished, he had a rough draft of two articles totalling twenty-one pages. That part of the story focused on the deaths of Svensson and Johansson – what they were working on, why they were killed, and who the killer was. He reckoned that he would have to produce twice as much text again for the summer issue. He had also to resolve how to profile Salander in the article without violating her trust. He knew things about her that she would never want published.

Gullberg had a single slice of bread and a cup of black coffee in Frey’s café. Then he took a taxi to Artillerigatan in Östermalm. At 9.15 he introduced himself on the entry phone and was buzzed inside. He took the lift to the seventh floor, where he was received by Birger Wadensjöö, the new chief of the Section.

Wadensjöö had been one of the latest recruits to the Section around the time Gullberg retired. He wished that the decisive Fredrik was still there. Clinton had succeeded Gullberg and was the chief of the Section until 2002, when diabetes and coronary artery disease had forced him into retirement. Gullberg did not have a clear sense of what Wadensjöö was made of.

“Welcome, Evert,” Wadensjöö said, shaking hands with his former chief. “It’s good of you to take the time to come in.”

“Time is more or less all I have,” Gullberg said.

“You know how it goes. I wish we had the leisure to stay in touch with faithful old colleagues.”

Gullberg ignored the insinuation. He turned left into his old office and sat at the round conference table by the window. He assumed it was Wadensjöö who was responsible for the Chagall and Mondrian reproductions. In his day plans of Kronan and Wasa had hung on the walls. He had always dreamed about the sea, and he was in fact a naval officer, although he had spent only a few brief months at sea during his military service. There were computers now, but otherwise the room looked almost exactly as when he had left. Wadensjöö poured coffee.

“The others are on their way,” he said. “I thought we could have a few words first.”

“How many in the Section are still here from my day?”

“Apart from me… only Otto Hallberg and Georg Nyström are still here. Hallberg is retiring this year, and Nyström is turning sixty. Otherwise it’s new recruits. You’ve probably met some of them before.”

“How many are working for the Section today?”

“We’ve reorganized a bit.”

“And?”

“There are seven full-timers. So we’ve cut back. But there’s a total of thirty-one employees of the Section within S.I.S. Most of them never come here. They take care of their normal jobs and do some discreet moonlighting for us should the need or opportunity arise.”

“Thirty-one employees.”

“Plus the seven here. You were the one who created the system, after all. We’ve just fine-tuned it. Today we have what’s called an internal and an external organization. When we recruit somebody, they’re given a leave of absence for a time to go to our school. Hallberg is in charge of training, which is six weeks for the basics. We do it out at the Naval School. Then they go back to their regular jobs in S.I.S., but now they’re working for us.”

“I see.”

“It’s an excellent system. Most of our employees have no idea of the others’ existence. And here in the Section we function principally as report recipients. The same rules apply as in your day. We have to be a single-level organization.”

“Have you an operations unit?”

Wadensjöö frowned. In Gullberg’s day the Section had a small operations unit consisting of four people under the command of the shrewd Hans von Rottinger.

“Well, not exactly. Von Rottinger died five years ago. We have a younger talent who does some field work, but usually we use someone from the external organization if necessary. But of course things have become more complicated technically, for example when we need to arrange a telephone tap or enter an apartment. Nowadays there are alarms and other devices everywhere.”

Gullberg nodded. “Budget?”

“We have about eleven million a year total. A third goes to salaries, a third to overheads, and a third to operations.”

“So the budget has shrunk.”

“A little. But we have fewer people, which means that the operations budget has actually increased.”

“Tell me about our relationship to S.I.S.”

Wadensjöö shook his head. “The chief of Secretariat and the chief of Budget belong to us. Formally, of course, the chief of Secretariat is the only one who has insight into our activities. We’re so secret that we don’t exist. But in practice two assistant chiefs know of our existence. They do their best to ignore anything they hear about us.”

“Which means that if problems arise, the present S.I.S. leadership will have an unpleasant surprise. What about the defence leadership and the government?”

“We cut off the defence leadership some ten years ago. And governments come and go.”

“So if the balloon goes up, we’re on our own?”

Wadensjöö nodded. “That’s the drawback with this arrangement. The advantages are obvious. But our assignments have also changed. There’s a new realpolitik in Europe since the Soviet Union collapsed. Our work is less and less about identifying spies. It’s about terrorism, and about evaluating the political suitability of individuals in sensitive positions.”

“That’s what it was always about.”

There was a knock at the door. Gullberg looked up to see a smartly dressed man of about sixty and a younger man in jeans and a tweed jacket.

“Come in… Evert Gullberg, this is Jonas Sandberg. He’s been working here for four years and is in charge of operations. He’s the one I told you about. And Georg Nyström you know.”

“Hello, Georg,” Gullberg said.

They all shook hands. Then Gullberg turned to Sandberg.

“So where do you come from?”

“Most recently from Göteborg,” Sandberg said lightly. “I went to see him.”

“Zalachenko?”

Sandberg nodded.

“Have a seat, gentlemen,” Wadensjöö said.

“Björck,” Gullberg said, frowning when Wadensjöö lit a cigarillo. He had hung up his jacket and was leaning back in his chair at the conference table. Wadensjöö glanced at Gullberg and was struck by how thin the old man had become.

“He was arrested for violation of the prostitution laws last Friday,” Nyström said. “The matter has gone to court, but in effect he confessed and slunk home with his tail between his legs. He lives out in Smådalarö, but he’s on disability leave. The press haven’t picked up on it yet.”

“He was once one of the very best we had here in the Section,” Gullberg said. “He played a key role in the Zalachenko affair. What’s happened to him since I retired?”

“Björck is probably one of the very few internal colleagues who left the Section and went back to external operations. He was out flitting around even in your day.”

“Well, I do recall that he needed a little rest and wanted to expand his horizons. He was on leave of absence from the Section for two years in the ’80s when he worked as intelligence attaché. He had worked like a fiend with Zalachenko, practically around the clock from 1976 on, and I thought that he needed a break. He was gone from 1985 to 1987, when he came back here.”

“You could say that he quit the Section in 1994 when he went over to the external organization. In 1996 he became assistant chief of the Immigration Division and ended up in a stressful position. His official duties took up a great deal of his time. Naturally he has stayed in contact with the Section throughout, and I can also say that we had conversations with him about once a month until recently.”

“So he’s ill?”

“It’s nothing serious, but very painful. He has a slipped disc. He’s had recurring trouble with it over the past few years. Two years ago he was on sick leave for four months. And then he was taken ill again in August last year. He was supposed to start work again at new year, but his sick leave was extended and now it’s a question of waiting for an operation.”

“And he spent his sick leave running around with prostitutes?” Gullberg said.

“Yes. He’s not married, and his dealings with whores appear to have been going on for many years, if I’ve understood correctly,” said Sandberg, who had been silent for almost half an hour. “I’ve read Dag Svensson’s manuscript.”

“I see. But can anyone explain to me what actually happened?”

“As far as we can tell, it was Björck who set this whole mess rolling. How else can we explain the report from 1991 ending up in the hands of Advokat Bjurman?”

“Another man who spends his time with prostitutes?” Gullberg said.

“Not as far as we know, and he wasn’t mentioned in Svensson’s material. He was, however, Lisbeth Salander’s guardian.”

Wadensjöö sighed. “You could say it was my fault. You and Björck arrested Salander in 1991, when she was sent to the psychiatric hospital. We expected her to be away for much longer, but she became acquainted with a lawyer, Advokat Palmgren, who managed to spring her loose. She was then placed with a foster family. By that time you had retired.”

“And then what happened?”

“We kept an eye on her. In the meantime her twin sister, Camilla, was placed in a foster home in Uppsala. When they were seventeen, Lisbeth started digging into her past. She was looking for Zalachenko, and she went through every public register she could find. Somehow – we’re not sure how it happened – she found out that her sister knew where Zalachenko was.”

“Was it true?”

Wadensjöö shrugged. “I have no idea. The sisters had not seen each other for several years when Lisbeth Salander ran Camilla to ground and tried to persuade her to tell her what she knew. It ended in a violent argument and a spectacular fight between the sisters.”

“Then what?”

“We kept close track of Lisbeth during those months. We had also informed Camilla that her sister was violent and mentally ill. She was the one who got in touch with us after Lisbeth’s unexpected visit, and thereafter we increased our surveillance of her.”

“So the sister was your informant?”

“Camilla was mortally afraid of her sister. Lisbeth had aroused attention in other quarters as well. She had several run-ins with people from the social welfare agency, and in our estimation she still represented a threat to Zalachenko’s anonymity. Then there was the incident in the tunnelbana.”

“She attacked a paedophile –”

“Precisely. She was obviously prone to violence and mentally disturbed. We thought that it would be best for all concerned if she disappeared into some institution again and availed herself of the opportunities there, so to speak. Clinton and von Rottinger were the ones who took the lead. They engaged the psychiatrist Teleborian again and through a representative filed a request in the district court to get her institutionalized for a second time. Palmgren stood up for Salander, and against all odds the court decided to follow his recommendation – so long as she was placed under guardianship.”

“But how did Bjurman get involved?”

“Palmgren had a stroke in the autumn of 2002. We still flag Salander for monitoring whenever she turns up in any database, and I saw to it that Bjurman became her new guardian. Bear in mind that he had no clue she was Zalachenko’s daughter. The brief was simply for Bjurman to sound the alarm if she started blabbing about Zalachenko.”

“Bjurman was an idiot. He should never have been allowed to have anything to do with Zalachenko, even less with his daughter.” Gullberg looked at Wadensjöö. “That was a serious mistake.”

“I know,” Wadensjöö said. “But he seemed the right choice at the time. I never would have dreamed that –”

“Where’s the sister today? Camilla Salander.”

“We don’t know. When she was nineteen she packed her bag and ran away from her foster family. We haven’t found hide nor hair of her since.”

“O.K., go on…”

“I have a man in the regular police who has spoken with Prosecutor Ekström,” Sandberg said. “The officer running the investigation, Inspector Bublanski, thinks that Bjurman raped Salander.”

Gullberg looked at Sandberg with blank astonishment.

“Raped?” he said.

“Bjurman had a tattoo across his belly which read I am a sadistic pig, a pervert, and a rapist.”

Sandberg put a colour photograph from the autopsy on the table. Gullberg stared at it with distaste.

“Zalachenko’s daughter is supposed to have given him that?”

“It’s hard to find another explanation. And she’s not known for being a shrinking violet. She spectacularly kicked the shit out of two complete thugs from Svavelsjö M.C.”

“Zalachenko’s daughter,” Gullberg repeated. He turned to Wadensjöö. “You know what? I think you ought to recruit her for the Section.”

Wadensjöö looked so startled that Gullberg quickly explained that he was joking.

“O.K. Let’s take it as a working hypothesis that Bjurman raped her and that she somehow took her revenge. What else?”

“The only one who could tell us exactly what happened, of course, is Bjurman, and he’s dead. But the thing is, he shouldn’t have had a clue that she was Zalachenko’s daughter; it’s not in any public records. But somehow, somewhere along the way, Bjurman discovered the connection.”

“But, Goddamnit Wadensjöö! She knew who her father was and could have told Bjurman at any time.”

“I know. We… that is, I simply wasn’t thinking straight.”

“That is unforgivably incompetent,” Gullberg said.

“I’ve kicked myself a hundred times about it. But Bjurman was one of the very few people who knew of Zalachenko’s existence and my thought was that it would be better if he discovered that she was Zalachenko’s daughter rather than some other unknown guardian. She could have told anyone at all.”

Gullberg pulled on his earlobe. “Alright… go on.”

“It’s all hypothetical,” Nyström said. “But our supposition is that Bjurman assaulted Salander and that she struck back and did that…” He pointed at the tattoo in the autopsy photograph.

“Her father’s daughter,” Gullberg said. There was more than a trace of admiration in his voice.

“With the result that Bjurman made contact with Zalachenko, hoping to get rid of the daughter. As we know, Zalachenko had good reason to hate the girl. And he gave the contract to Svavelsjö M.C. and this Niedermann that he hangs out with.”

“But how did Bjurman get in touch –” Gullberg fell silent. The answer was obvious.

“Björck,” Wadensjöö said. “Björck gave him the contact.”

“Damn,” Gullberg said.

In the morning two nurses had come to change her bedlinen. They had found the pencil.

“Oops. How did this get here?” one of them said, putting the pencil in her pocket. Salander looked at her with murder in her eyes.

She was once more without a weapon, but she was too weak to protest.

Her headache was unbearable and she was given strong painkillers. Her left shoulder stabbed like a knife if she moved carelessly or tried to shift her weight. She lay on her back with the brace around her neck. It was supposed to be left on for a few more days until the wound in her head began to heal. On Sunday she had a temperature of 102. Dr Endrin could tell that there was infection in her body. Salander did not need a thermometer to work that out.

She realized that once again she was confined to an institutional bed, even though this time there was no strap holding her down. That would have been unnecessary. She could not sit up even, let alone leave the room.

At lunchtime on Monday she had a visit from Dr Jonasson.

“Hello. Do you remember me?”

She shook her head.

“I was the one who woke you after surgery. I operated on you. I just wanted to hear how you’re doing and if everything is going well.”

Salander looked at him, her eyes wide. It should have been obvious that everything was not going well.

“I heard you took off your neck brace last night.”

She acknowledged as much with her eyes.

“We put the neck brace on for a reason – you have to keep your head still for the healing process to get started.” He looked at the silent girl. “O.K.,” he said at last. “I just wanted to check on you.”

He was at the door when he heard her voice.

“It’s Jonasson, right?”

He turned and smiled at her in surprise. “That’s right. If you remember my name then you must have been more alert than I thought.”

“And you were the one who operated to remove the bullet?”

“That’s right.”

“Please tell me how I’m doing. I can’t get a sensible answer from anyone.”

He went back to her bedside and looked her in the eye.

“You were lucky. You were shot in the head, but the bullet did not, I believe, injure any vital areas. The risk you are running is that you could have bleeding in your brain. That’s why we want you to stay still. You have an infection in your body. The wound in your shoulder seems to be the cause. It’s possible that you’ll need another operation – on your shoulder – if we can’t arrest the infection with antibiotics. You are going to have some painful times ahead while your body heals. But as things look now, I’m optimistic that you’ll make a full recovery.”

“Can this cause brain damage?”

He hesitated before nodding. “Yes, there is that possibility. But all the signs indicate that you made it through fine. There’s also a possibility that you’ll develop scar tissue in your brain, and that might cause trouble… for instance, you might develop epilepsy or some other problem. But to be honest, it’s all speculation. Right now, things look good. You’re healing. And if problems crop up along the way, we’ll deal with them. Is that a clear enough answer?”

She shut her eyes to say yes. “How long do I have to lie here like this?”

“You mean in the hospital? It will be at the least a couple of weeks before we can let you go.”

“No, I mean how long before I can get up and start walking and moving around?”

“That depends on how the healing progresses. But count on two weeks before we can start you on some sort of physical therapy.”

She gave him a long look. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?” she said.

Dr Jonasson burst out laughing and shook his head. “Sorry. There’s no smoking allowed in the hospital. But I can see to it that you get a nicotine patch or some gum.”

She thought for a moment before she looked at him again. “How’s the old bastard doing?”

“Who? You mean –”

“The one who came in the same time as I did.”

“No friend of yours, I presume. Well, he’s going to survive and he’s been up walking around on crutches. He’s actually in worse shape than you are, and he has a very painful facial wound. As I understood it, you slammed an axe into his head.”

“He tried to kill me,” Salander said in a low voice.

“That doesn’t sound good. I have to go. Do you want me to come back and look in on you again?”

Salander thought for a moment, then she signalled yes. When he was gone she stared at the ceiling. Zalachenko has been given crutches. That was the sound I heard last night.

Sandberg, the youngest person at the meeting, was sent out to get some food. He came back with sushi and light beer and passed the food around the conference table. Gullberg felt a thrill of nostalgia. This is just the way it was in his day, when some operation went into a critical phase and they had to work around the clock.

The difference, he observed, was possibly that in his day there was nobody who would have come up with the wild idea of ordering raw fish. He wished Sandberg had ordered Swedish meatballs with mashed potatoes and lingonberries. On the other hand he was not really hungry, so he pushed the sushi aside. He ate a piece of bread and drank some mineral water.

They continued the discussion over their meal. They had to decide what to do. The situation was urgent.

“I never knew Zalachenko,” Wadensjöö said. “What was he like?”

“Much as he is today, I assume,” Gullberg said. “Phenomenally intelligent, with a damn near photographic memory. But in my opinion he’s a pig. And not quite right in the head, I should think.”

“Jonas, you talked to him yesterday. What’s your take on this?” Wadensjöö said.

Sandberg put down his chopsticks.

“He’s got us over a barrel. I’ve already told you about his ultimatum. Either we make the whole thing disappear, or he cracks the Section wide open.”

“How the hell do we make something disappear that’s been plastered all over the media?” Nyström said.

“It’s not a question of what we can or can’t do. It’s a question of his need to control us,” Gullberg said.

“Would he, in your opinion, talk to the press?” Wadensjöö said.

Gullberg hesitated. “It’s almost impossible to answer that question. Zalachenko doesn’t make empty threats, and he’s going to do what’s best for him. In that respect he’s predictable. If it benefits him to talk to the media… if he thought he could get an amnesty or a reduced sentence, then he’d do it. Or if he felt betrayed and wanted to get even.”

“Regardless of the consequences?”

“Especially regardless of the consequences. For him the point is to be seen to be tougher than all of us.”

“If Zalachenko were to talk, it’s not certain that anyone would believe him. And to prove anything they’d have to get hold of our archives.”

“Do you want to take the chance? Let’s say Zalachenko talks. Who’s going to talk next? What do we do if Björck signs an affidavit confirming his story? And Clinton, sitting at his dialysis machine… what would happen if he turned religious and felt bitter about everything and everyone? What if he wanted to make a confession? Believe me, if anyone starts talking, it’s the end of the Section.”

“So… what should we do?”

Silence settled over the table. It was Gullberg who took up the thread.

“There are several parts to this problem. First of all, we can agree on what the consequences would be if Zalachenko talked. The entire legal system would come crashing down on our heads. We would be demolished. My guess is that several employees of the Section would go to prison.”

“Our activity is completely legal… we’re actually working under the auspices of the government.”

“Spare me the bullshit,” Gullberg said. “You know as well as I do that a loosely formulated document that was written in the mid-’60s isn’t worth a damn today. I don’t think any one of us could even imagine what would happen if Zalachenko talked.”

Silence descended once again.

“So our starting point has to be to persuade Zalachenko to keep his mouth shut,” Nyström said at last.

“And to be able to persuade him to keep his mouth shut, we have to be able to offer him something substantial. The problem is that he’s unpredictable. He would scorch us out of sheer malice. We have to think about how we can keep him in check.”

“And what about his demand…,” Sandberg said, “that we make the whole thing disappear and put Salander back in an asylum?”

“Salander we can handle. It’s Zalachenko who’s the problem. But that leads us to the second part – damage control. Teleborian’s report from 1991 has been leaked, and it’s potentially as serious a threat as Zalachenko.”

Nyström cleared his throat. “As soon as we realized that the report was out and in the hands of the police, I took certain measures. I went through Forelius, our lawyer in S.I.S., and he got hold of the Prosecutor General. The P.G. ordered the report confiscated from the police – it’s not to be disseminated or copied.”

“How much does the P.G. know?” Gullberg said.

“Not a thing. He’s acting on an official request from S.I.S. It’s classified material and the P.G. has no alternative.”

“Who in the police has read the report?”

“There were two copies which were read by Bublanski, his colleague Inspector Modig, and finally the preliminary investigation leader, Richard Ekström. We can assume that another two police officers…,” Nyström leafed through his notes, “… that Curt Andersson and Jerker Holmberg at least, are aware of the contents.”

“So, four police officers and one prosecutor. What do we know about them?”

“Prosecutor Ekström, forty-two, regarded as a rising star. He’s been an investigator at Justice and has handled a number of cases that got a fair bit of attention. Zealous. P.R.-savvy. Careerist.”

“Social Democrat?” Gullberg said.

“Probably. But not active.”

“So Bublanski is leading the investigation. I saw him in a press conference on T.V. He didn’t seem comfortable in front of the cameras.”

“He’s older and has an exceptional record, but he also has a reputation for being crusty and obstinate. He’s Jewish and quite conservative.”

“And the woman… who’s she?”

“Sonja Modig. Married, thirty-nine, two kids. Has advanced rather quickly in her career. I talked to Teleborian, who described her as emotional. She asks questions non-stop.”

“Next.”

“Andersson is a tough customer. He’s thirty-eight and comes from the gangs unit in Söder. He landed in the spotlight when he shot dead some hooligan a couple of years ago. Acquitted of all charges, according to the report. He was the one Bublanski sent to arrest Björck.”

“I see. Keep in mind that he shot someone dead. If there’s any reason to cast doubt on Bublanski’s group, we can always single him out as a rogue policeman. I assume we still have relevant media contacts. And the last guy?”

“Holmberg, fifty-five. Comes from Norrland and is in fact a specialist in crime scene investigation. He was offered supervisory training a few years ago but turned it down. He seems to like his job.”

“Are any of them politically active?”

“No. Holmberg’s father was a city councillor for the Centre Party in the ’70s.”

“It seems to be a modest group. We can assume they’re fairly tight-knit. Could we isolate them somehow?”

“There’s a fifth officer involved,” Nyström said. “Hans Faste, forty-seven. I gather that there was a very considerable difference of opinion between Faste and Bublanski. So much so that Faste took sick leave.”

“What do we know about him?”

“I get mixed reactions when I ask. He has an exemplary record with no real criticisms. A pro. But he’s tricky to deal with. The disagreement with Bublanski seems to have been about Salander.”

“In what way?”

“Faste appears to have become obsessed by one newspaper story about a lesbian Satanist gang. He really doesn’t like Salander and seems to regard her existence as a personal insult. He may himself be behind half of the rumours. I was told by a former colleague that he has difficulty working with women.”

“Interesting,” Gullberg said slowly. “Since the newspapers have already written about a lesbian gang, it would make sense to continue promoting that story. It won’t exactly bolster Salander’s credibility.”

“But the officers who’ve read Björck’s report are a big problem,” Sandberg said. “Is there any way we can isolate them?”

Wadensjöö lit another cigarillo. “Well, Ekström is the head of the preliminary investigation…”

“But Bublanski’s leading it,” Nyström said.

“Yes, but he can’t go against an administrative decision.” Wadensjöö turned to Gullberg. “You have more experience than I do, but this whole story has so many different threads and connections… It seems to me that it would be wise to get Bublanski and Modig away from Salander.”

“That’s good, Wadensjöö,” Gullberg said. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Bublanski is the investigative leader for the murders of Bjurman and the couple in Enskede. Salander is no longer a suspect. Now it’s all about this German, Ronald Niedermann. Bublanski and his team have to focus on Niedermann. Salander is not their assignment any more. Then there’s the investigation at Nykvarn… three cold-case killings. And there’s a connection to Niedermann there too. That investigation is presently allocated to Södertälje, but it ought to be brought into a single investigation. That way Bublanski would have his hands full for a while. And who knows? Maybe he’ll catch Niedermann. Meanwhile, Hans Faste… do you think he might come back on duty? He sounds like the right man to investigate the allegations against Salander.”

“I see what you’re thinking,” Wadensjöö said. “It’s all about getting Ekström to split the two cases. But that’s only if we can control Ekström.”

“That shouldn’t be such a big problem,” Gullberg said. He glanced at Nyström, who nodded.

“I can take care of Ekström,” he said. “I’m guessing that he’s sitting there wishing he’d never heard of Zalachenko. He turned over Björck’s report as soon as S.I.S. asked him for it, and he’s agreed to comply with every request that may have a bearing on national security.”

“What do you have in mind?” Wadensjöö said.

“Allow me to manufacture a scenario,” Nyström said. “I assume that we’re going to tell him in a subtle way what he has to do to avoid an abrupt end to his career.”

“The most serious problem is going to be the third part,” Gullberg said. “The police didn’t get hold of Björck’s report by themselves… they got it from a journalist. And the press, as you are all aware, is a real problem here. Millennium.”

Nyström turned a page his notebook. “Mikael Blomkvist.”

Everyone around the table had heard of the Wennerström affair and knew the name.

“Svensson, the journalist who was murdered, was freelancing at Millennium. He was working on a story about sex trafficking. That was how he lit upon Zalachenko. It was Blomkvist who found Svensson and his girlfriend’s bodies. In addition, Blomkvist knows Salander and has always believed in her innocence.”

“How the hell can he know Zalachenko’s daughter… that sounds like too big a coincidence.”

“We don’t think it is a coincidence,” Wadensjöö said. “We believe that Salander is in some way the link between all of them, but we don’t yet know how.”

Gullberg drew a series of concentric circles on his notepad. At last he looked up.

“I have to think about this for a while. I’m going for a walk. We’ll meet again in an hour.”

Gullberg’s excursion lasted nearly three hours. He had walked for only about ten minutes before he found a café that served many unfamiliar types of coffee. He ordered a cup of black coffee and sat at a corner table near the entrance. He spent a long time thinking things over, trying to dissect the various aspects of their dilemma. Occasionally he would jot down notes in a pocket diary.

After an hour and a half a plan had begun to take shape.

It was not a perfect plan, but after weighing all the options he concluded that the problem called for a drastic solution.

As luck would have it, the human resources were available. It was doable.

He got up to find a telephone booth and called Wadensjöö.

“We’ll have to postpone the meeting a bit longer,” he said. “There’s something I have to do. Can we meet again at 2.00 p.m.?”

Gullberg went down to Stureplan and hailed a taxi. He gave the driver an address in the suburb of Bromma. When he was dropped off, he walked south one street and rang the doorbell of a small, semidetached house. A woman in her forties opened the door.

“Good afternoon. I’m looking for Fredrik Clinton.”

“Who should I say is here?”

“An old colleague.”

The woman nodded and showed him into the living room, where Clinton rose slowly from the sofa. He was only sixty-eight, but he looked much older. His ill health had taken a heavy toll.

“Gullberg,” Clinton said in surprise.

For a long moment they stood looking at each other. Then the two old agents embraced.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” Clinton said. He pointed to the front page of the evening paper, which had a photograph of Niedermann and the headline POLICE KILLER HUNTED IN DENMARK. “I assume that’s what’s brought you out here.”

“How are you?”

“I’m sick,” Clinton said.

“I can see that.”

“If I don’t get a new kidney I’m not long for this world. And the likelihood of my getting one in this people’s republic is pretty slim.”

The woman came to the living-room doorway and asked if Gullberg would like anything.

“A cup of coffee, thank you,” he said. When she was gone he turned to Clinton. “Who’s that?”

“My daughter.”

It was fascinating that despite the collegial atmosphere they had shared for so many years at the Section, hardly anyone socialized with each other in their free time. Gullberg knew the most minute character traits, strengths and weaknesses of all his colleagues, but he had only a vague notion of their family lives. Clinton had probably been Gullberg’s closest colleague for twenty years. He knew that he had been married and had children, but he did not know the daughter’s name, his late wife’s name, or even where Clinton usually spent his holidays. It was as if everything outside the Section were sacred, not to be discussed.

“What can I do for you?” asked Clinton.

“Can I ask you what you think of Wadensjöö.”

Clinton shook his head. “I don’t want to get into it.”

“That’s not what I asked. You know him. He worked with you for ten years.”

Clinton shook his head again. “He’s the one running the Section today. What I think is no longer of any interest.”

“Can he handle it?”

“He’s no idiot.”

“But?”

“He’s an analyst. Extremely good at puzzles. Instinctual. A brilliant administrator who balanced the budget, and did it in a way we didn’t think was possible.”

Gullberg nodded. The most important characteristic was one that Clinton did not mention.

“Are you ready to come back to work?”

Clinton looked up. He hesitated for a long time.

“Evert… I spend nine hours every other day on a dialysis machine at the hospital. I can’t go up stairs without gasping for breath. I simply have no energy. No energy at all.”

“I need you. One last operation.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. And you can still spend nine hours every other day on dialysis. You can take the lift instead of going up the stairs. I’ll even arrange for somebody to carry you back and forth on a stretcher if necessary. It’s your mind I need.”

Clinton sighed. “Tell me.”

“Right now we’re confronted with an exceptionally complicated situation that requires operational expertise. Wadensjöö has a young kid, still wet behind the ears, called Jonas Sandberg. He’s the entire operations department and I don’t think Wadensjöö has the drive to do what needs to be done. He might be a genius at finessing the budget, but he’s afraid to make operational decisions, and he’s afraid to get the Section involved in the necessary field work.”

Clinton gave him a feeble smile.

“The operation has to be carried out on two separate fronts. One part concerns Zalachenko. I have to get him to listen to reason, and I think I know how I’m going to do it. The second part has to be handled from here, in Stockholm. The problem is that there isn’t anyone in the Section who can actually run it. I need you to take command. One last job. Sandberg and Nyström will do the legwork, you control the operation.”

“You don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Yes, I do. But you’re going to have to make up your mind whether to take on the assignment or not. Either we ancients step in and do our bit, or the Section will cease to exist a few weeks from now.”

Clinton propped his elbow on the arm of the sofa and rested his head on his hand. He thought about it for two minutes.

“Tell me your plan,” he said at last.

Gullberg and Clinton talked for a long time.

Wadensjöö stared in disbelief when Gullberg returned at 2.57 with Clinton in tow. Clinton looked like… a skeleton. He seemed to have difficulty breathing; he kept one hand on Gullberg’s shoulder.

“What in the world…” Wadensjöö said.

“Let’s get the meeting moving again,” Gullberg said, briskly.

They settled themselves again around the table in Wadensjöö’s office. Clinton sank silently on to the chair that was offered.

“You all know Fredrik Clinton,” Gullberg said.

“Indeed,” Wadensjöö said. “The question is, what’s he doing here?”

“Clinton has decided to return to active duty. He’ll be leading the Section’s operations department until the present crisis is over.” Gullberg raised a hand to forestall Wadensjöö’s objections. “Clinton is tired. He’s going to need assistance. He has to go regularly to the hospital for dialysis. Wadensjöö, assign two personal assistants to help him with all the practical matters. But let me make this quite clear… with regards to this affair it’s Clinton who will be making the operational decisions.”

He paused for a moment. No-one voiced any objections.

“I have a plan. I think we can handle this matter successfully, but we’re going to have to act fast so that we don’t squander the opportunity,” he said. “It depends on how decisive you can be in the Section these days.”

“Let’s hear it.” Wadensjöö said.

“First of all, we’ve already discussed the police. This is what we’re going to do. We’ll try to isolate them in a lengthy investigation, sidetracking them into the search for Niedermann. That will be Nyström’s task. Whatever happens, Niedermann is of no importance. We’ll arrange for Faste to be assigned to investigate Salander.”

“That may not be such a bright idea,” Nyström said. “Why don’t I just go and have a discreet talk with Prosecutor Ekström?”

“And if he gets difficult –”

“I don’t think he will. He’s ambitious and on the lookout for anything that will benefit his career. I might be able to use some leverage if I need to. He would hate to be dragged into any sort of scandal.”

“Good. Stage two is Millennium and Mikael Blomkvist. That’s why Clinton has returned to duty. This will require extraordinary measures.”

“I don’t think I’m going to like this,” Wadensjöö said.

“Probably not. But Millennium can’t be manipulated in the same straightforward way. On the other hand, the magazine is a threat because of one thing only: Björck’s 1991 police report. I presume that the report now exists in two places, possibly three. Salander found the report, but Blomkvist somehow got hold of it. Which means that there was some degree of contact between the two of them while Salander was on the run.”

Clinton held up a finger and uttered his first words since he had arrived.

“It also tells us something about the character of our adversary. Blomkvist is not afraid to take risks. Remember the Wennerström affair.”

Gullberg nodded. “Blomkvist gave the report to his editor-in-chief, Erika Berger, who in turn messengered it to Bublanski. So she’s read it too. We have to assume that they made a copy for safekeeping. I’m guessing that Blomkvist has a copy and that there’s one at the editorial offices.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Wadensjöö said.

“Millennium is a monthly, so they won’t be publishing it tomorrow. We’ve got a little time – find out exactly how long before the next issue is published – but we have to confiscate both those copies. And here we can’t go through the Prosecutor General.”

“I understand.”

“So we’re talking about an operation, getting into Blomkvist’s apartment and Millennium’s offices. Can you handle that, Jonas?”

Sandberg glanced at Wadensjöö.

“Evert… you have to understand that… we don’t do things like that any more,” Wadensjöö said. “It’s a new era. We deal more with computer hacking and electronic surveillance and such like. We don’t have the resources for what you’d think of as an operations unit.”

Gullberg leaned forward. “Wadensjöö, you’re going to have to sort out some resources pretty damn fast. Hire some people. Hire a bunch of skinheads from the Yugo mafia who can whack Blomkvist over the head if necessary. But those two copies have to be recovered. If they don’t have the copies, they don’t have the evidence. If you can’t manage a simple job like that then you might as well sit here with your thumb up your backside until the constitutional committee comes knocking on your door.”

Gullberg and Wadensjöö glared at each other for a long moment.

“I can handle it,” Sandberg said suddenly.

“Are you sure?”

Sandberg nodded.

“Good. Starting now, Clinton is your boss. He’s the one you take your orders from.”

Sandberg nodded his agreement.

“It’s going to involve a lot of surveillance,” Nyström said. “I can suggest a few names. We have a man in the external organization, Mårtensson – he works as a bodyguard in S.I.S. He’s fearless and shows promise. I’ve been considering bringing him in here. I’ve even thought that he could take my place one day.”

“That sounds good,” Gullberg said. “Clinton can decide.”

“I’m afraid there might be a third copy,” Nyström said.

“Where?”

“This afternoon I found out that Salander has taken on a lawyer. Her name is Annika Giannini. She’s Blomkvist’s sister.”

Gullberg pondered this news. “You’re right. Blomkvist will have given his sister a copy. He must have. In other words, we have to keep tabs on all three of them – Berger, Blomkvist and Giannini – until further notice.”

“I don’t think we have to worry about Berger. There was a report today that she’s going to be the new editor-in-chief at Svenska Morgon-Posten. She’s finished with Millennium.”

“Check her out anyway. As far as Millennium is concerned, we’re going to need telephone taps and bugs in everyone’s homes, and at the offices. We have to check their email. We have to know who they meet and who they talk to. And we would very much like to know what strategy they’re planning. Above all we have to get those copies of the report. A whole lot of stuff, in other words.”

Wadensjöö sounded doubtful. “Evert, you’re asking us to run an operation against an influential magazine and the editor-in-chief of S.M.P. That’s just about the riskiest thing we could do.”

“Understand this: you have no choice. Either you roll up your sleeves or it’s time for somebody else to take over here.”

The challenge hung like a cloud over the table.

“I think I can handle Millennium,” Sandberg said at last. “But none of this solves the basic problem. What do we do with Zalachenko? If he talks, anything else we pull off is useless.”

“I know. That’s my part of the operation,” Gullberg said. “I think I have an argument that will persuade Zalachenko to keep his mouth shut. But it’s going to take some preparation. I’m leaving for Göteborg later this afternoon.”

He paused and looked around the room. Then he fixed his eyes on Wadensjöö.

“Clinton will make the operational decisions while I’m gone,” he said.

Not until Monday evening did Dr Endrin decide, in consultation with her colleague Dr Jonasson, that Salander’s condition was stable enough for her to have visitors. First, two police inspectors were given fifteen minutes to ask her questions. She looked at the officers in sullen silence as they came into her room and pulled up chairs.

“Hello. My name is Marcus Erlander, Criminal Inspector. I work in the Violent Crimes Division here in Göteborg. This is my colleague Inspector Modig from the Stockholm police.”

Salander said nothing. Her expression did not change. She recognized Modig as one of the officers in Bublanski’s team. Erlander gave her a cool smile.

“I’ve been told that you don’t generally communicate much with the authorities. Let me put it on record that you do not have to say anything at all. But I would be grateful if you would listen to what we have to say. We have a number of things to discuss with you, but we don’t have time to go into them all today. There’ll be opportunities later.”

Salander still said nothing.

“First of all, I’d like to let you know that your friend Mikael Blomkvist has told us that a lawyer by the name of Annika Giannini is willing to represent you, and that she knows about the case. He says that he already mentioned her name to you in connection with something else. I need you to confirm that this would be your intention. I’d also like to know if you want Giannini to come here to Göteborg, the better to represent you.”

Annika Giannini. Blomkvist’s sister. He had mentioned her in an email. Salander had not thought about the fact that she would need a lawyer.

“I’m sorry, but I have to insist that you answer the question. A yes or no will be fine. If you say yes, the prosecutor here in Göteborg will contact Advokat Giannini. If you say no, the court will appoint a defence lawyer on your behalf. Which do you prefer?”

Salander considered the choice. She assumed that she really would need a lawyer, but having Kalle Bastard Blomkvist’s sister working for her was hard to stomach. On the other hand, some unknown lawyer appointed by the court would probably be worse. She rasped out a single word:

“Giannini.”

“Good. Thank you. Now I have a question for you. You don’t have to say anything before your lawyer gets here, but this question does not, as far as I can see, affect you or your welfare. The police are looking for a German citizen by the name of Ronald Niedermann, wanted for the murder of a policeman.”

Salander frowned. She had no clue as to what had happened after she had swung the axe at Zalachenko’s head.

“As far as the Göteborg police are concerned, they are anxious to arrest him as soon as possible. My colleague here would like to question him also in connection with the three recent murders in Stockholm. You should know that you are no longer a suspect in those cases. So we are asking for your help. Do you have any idea… can you give us any help at all in finding this man?”

Salander flicked her eyes suspiciously from Erlander to Modig and back.

They don’t know that he’s my brother.

Then she considered whether she wanted Niedermann caught or not. Most of all she wanted to take him to a hole in the ground in Gosseberga and bury him. Finally she shrugged. Which she should not have done, because pain flew through her left shoulder.

“What day is it today?” she said.

“Monday.”

She thought about that. “The first time I heard the name Ronald Niedermann was last Thursday. I tracked him to Gosseberga. I have no idea where he is or where he might go, but he’ll try to get out of the country as soon as he can.”

“Why would he flee abroad?”

Salander thought about it. “Because while Niedermann was out digging a grave for me, Zalachenko told me that things were getting too hot and that it had already been decided that Niedermann should leave the country for a while.”

Salander had not exchanged this many words with a police officer since she was twelve.

“Zalachenko… so that’s your father?”

Well, at least they had worked that one out. Probably thanks to Kalle Bastard Blomkvist.

“I have to tell you that your father has made a formal accusation to the police stating that you tried to murder him. The case is now at the prosecutor’s office, and he has to decide whether to bring charges. But you have already been placed under arrest on a charge of grievous bodily harm, for having struck Zalachenko on the head with an axe.”

There was a long silence. Then Modig leaned forward and said in a low voice, “I just want to say that we on the police force don’t put much faith in Zalachenko’s story. Do have a serious discussion with your lawyer so we can come back later and have another talk.”

The detectives stood up.

“Thanks for the help with Niedermann,” Erlander said.

Salander was surprised that the officers had treated her in such a correct, almost friendly manner. She thought about what the Modig woman had said. There would be some ulterior motive, she decided.

CHAPTER 7

At 5.45 p.m. on Monday Blomkvist closed the lid on his iBook and got up from the kitchen table in his apartment on Bellmansgatan. He put on a jacket and walked to Milton Security’s offices at Slussen. He took the lift up to the reception on the fourth floor and was immediately shown into a conference room. It was 6.00 p.m. on the dot, but he was the last to arrive.

“Hello, Dragan,” he said and shook hands. “Thank you for being willing to host this informal meeting.”

Blomkvist looked around the room. There were four others there: his sister, Salander’s former guardian Holger Palmgren, Malin Eriksson, and former Criminal Inspector Sonny Bohman, who now worked for Milton Security. At Armansky’s instruction Bohman had been following the Salander investigation from the very start.

Palmgren was on his first outing in more than two years. Dr Sivarnandan of the Ersta rehabilitation home had been less than enchanted at the idea of letting him out, but Palmgren himself had insisted. He had come by special transport for the disabled, accompanied by his personal nurse, Johanna Karolina Oskarsson, whose salary was paid from a fund that had been mysteriously established to provide Palmgren with the best possible care. The nurse was sitting in an office next to the conference room. She had brought a book with her. Blomkvist closed the door behind him.

“For those of you who haven’t met her before, this is Malin Eriksson, Millennium’s editor-in-chief. I asked her to be here because what we’re going to discuss will also affect her job.”

“O.K.,” Armansky said. “Everyone’s here. I’m all ears.”

Blomkvist stood at Armansky’s whiteboard and picked up a marker. He looked around.

“This is probably the craziest thing I’ve ever been involved with,” he said. “When this is all over I’m going to found an association called ‘The Knights of the Idiotic Table’ and its purpose will be to arrange an annual dinner where we tell stories about Lisbeth Salander. You’re all members.”

He paused.

“So, this is how things really are,” he said, and he began to make a list of headings on Armansky’s whiteboard. He talked for a good thirty minutes. Afterwards the discussion went on for almost three hours.

Gullberg sat down next to Clinton when their meeting was over. They spoke in low voices for a few minutes before Gullberg stood up. The old comrades shook hands.

Gullberg took a taxi to Frey’s, packed his briefcase and checked out. He took the late afternoon train to Göteborg. He chose first class and had the compartment to himself. When he passed Årstabron he took out a ballpoint pen and a plain paper pad. He thought for a long while and then began to write. He filled half the page before he stopped and tore the sheet off the pad.

Forged documents had never been his department or his expertise, but here the task was simplified by the fact that the letters he was writing would be signed by himself. What complicated the issue was that not a word of what he was writing was true.

By the time the train went through Nyköping he had already discarded a number of drafts, but he was starting to get a line on how the letters should be expressed. When they arrived in Göteborg he had twelve letters he was satisfied with. He made sure he had left clear fingerprints on each sheet.

At Göteborg Central Station he tracked down a photocopier and made copies of the letters. Then he bought envelopes and stamps and posted the letters in a box with a 9.00 p.m. collection.

Gullberg took a taxi to City Hotel on Lorensbergsgatan, where Clinton had already booked a room for him. It was the same hotel Blomkvist had spent the night in several days before. He went straight to his room and sat on the bed. He was completely exhausted and realized that he had eaten only two slices of bread all day. Yet he was not hungry. He undressed, stretched out in bed, and almost at once fell asleep.

Salander woke with a start when she heard the door open. She knew right away that it was not one of the night nurses. She opened her eyes to two narrow slits and saw a silhouette with crutches in the doorway. Zalachenko was watching her in the light that came from the corridor.

Without moving her head she glanced at the digital clock: 3.10 a.m.

She then glanced at the bedside table and saw the water glass. She calculated the distance. She could just reach it without having to move her body.

It would take a very few seconds to stretch out her arm and break off the rim of the glass with a firm rap against the hard edge of the table. It would take half a second to shove the broken edge into Zalachenko’s throat if he leaned over her. She looked for other options, but the glass was her only reachable weapon.

She relaxed and waited.

Zalachenko stood in the doorway for two minutes without moving. Then gingerly he closed the door.

She heard the faint scraping of the crutches as he quietly retreated down the corridor.

Five minutes later she propped herself up on her right elbow, reached for the glass, and took a long drink of water. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pulled the electrodes off her arms and chest. With an effort she stood up and swayed unsteadily. It took her about a minute to gain control over her body. She hobbled to the door and leaned against the wall to catch her breath. She was in a cold sweat. Then she turned icy with rage.

Fuck you, Zalachenko. Let’s end this right here and now.

She needed a weapon.

The next moment she heard quick heels clacking in the corridor.

Shit. The electrodes.

“What in God’s name are you doing up?” the night nurse said.

“I had to… go… to the toilet,” Salander said breathlessly.

“Get back into bed at once.”

She took Salander’s hand and helped her into the bed. Then she got a bedpan.

“When you have to go to the toilet, just ring for us. That’s what this button is for.”

Blomkvist woke up at 10.30 on Tuesday, showered, put on coffee, and then sat down with his iBook. After the meeting at Milton Security the previous evening, he had come home and worked until 5.00 a.m. The story was beginning at last to take shape. Zalachenko’s biography was still vague – all he had was what he had blackmailed Björck to reveal, as well as the handful of details Palmgren had been able to provide. Salander’s story was pretty much done. He explained step by step how she had been targeted by a gang of Cold-Warmongers at S.I.S. and locked away in a psychiatric hospital to stop her blowing the gaff on Zalachenko.

He was pleased with what he had written. There were still some holes that he would have to fill, but he knew that he had one hell of a story. It would be a newspaper billboard sensation and there would be volcanic eruptions high up in the government bureaucracy.

He smoked a cigarette while he thought.

He could see two particular gaps that needed attention. One was manageable. He had to deal with Teleborian, and he was looking forward to that assignment. When he was finished with him, the renowned children’s psychiatrist would be one of the most detested men in Sweden. That was one thing.

The second thing was more complicated.

The men who conspired against Salander – he thought of them as the Zalachenko club – were inside the Security Police. He knew one, Gunnar Björck, but Björck could not possibly be the only man responsible. There had to be a group… a division or unit of some sort. There must be chiefs, operations managers. There had to be a budget. But he had no idea how to go about identifying these people, where even to start. He had only the vaguest notion of how Säpo was organized.

On Monday he had begun his research by sending Cortez to the second-hand bookshops on Södermalm, to buy every book which in any way dealt with the Security Police. Cortez had come to his apartment in the afternoon with six books.

Espionage in Sweden by Mikael Rosquist (Tempus, 1988); Säpo Chief 1962–1970 by P.G. Vinge (Wahlström&Widstrand, 1988); Secret Forces by Jan Ottosson and Lars Magnusson (Tiden, 1991); Power Struggle for Säpo by Erik Magnusson (Corona, 1989); An Assignment by Carl Lidbom (Wahlström&Widstrand, 1990); and – somewhat surprisingly – An Agent in Place by Thomas Whiteside (Ballantine, 1966), which dealt with the Wennerström affair. The Wennerström affair of the ’60s, not Blomkvist’s own much more recent Wennerström affair.

He had spent much of Monday night and the early hours of Tuesday morning reading or at least skimming the books. When he had finished he made some observations. First, most of the books published about the Security Police were from the late ’80s. An Internet search showed that there was hardly any current literature on the subject.

Second, there did not seem to be any intelligible basic overview of the activities of the Swedish secret police over the years. This may have been because many documents were stamped Top Secret and were therefore off limits, but there did not seem to be any single institution, researcher or media that had carried out a critical examination of Säpo.

He also noticed another odd thing: there was no bibliography in any one of the books Cortez had found. On the other hand, the footnotes often referred to articles in the evening newspapers, or to interviews with some old, retired Säpo hand.

The book Secret Forces was fascinating but largely dealt with the time before and during the Second World War. Blomkvist regarded P.G. Vinge’s memoir as propaganda, written in self-defence by a severely criticized Säpo chief who was eventually fired. An Agent in Place contained so much inaccurate information about Sweden in the first chapter that he threw the book into the wastepaper basket. The only two books with any real ambition to portray the work of the Security Police were Power Struggle for Säpo and Espionage in Sweden. They contained data, names and organizational charts. He found Magnusson’s book to be especially worthwhile reading. Even though it did not offer any answers to his immediate questions, it provided a good account of Säpo as a structure as well as its primary concerns over several decades.

The biggest surprise was Lidbom’s An Assignment, which described the problems encountered by the former Swedish ambassador to France when he was commissioned to examine Säpo in the wake of the Palme assassination and the Ebbe Carlsson affair. Blomkvist had never before read anything by Lidbom, and he was taken aback by the sarcastic tone combined with razor-sharp observations. But even Lidbom’s book brought Blomkvist no closer to an answer to his questions, even if he was beginning to get an idea of what he was up against.

He opened his mobile and called Cortez.

“Hi, Henry. Thanks for the legwork yesterday.”

“What do you need now?”

“A little more legwork.”

“Micke, I hate to say this, but I have a job to do. I’m editorial assistant now.”

“An excellent career advancement.”

“What is it you want?”

“Over the years there have been a number of public reports on Säpo. Carl Lidbom did one. There must be several others like it.”

“I see.”

“Order everything you can find from parliament: budgets, public reports, interpellations, and the like. And get Säpo’s annual reports as far back as you can find them.”

“Yes, master.”

“Good man. And, Henry…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t need them until tomorrow.”

Salander spent the whole day brooding about Zalachenko. She knew that he was only two doors away, that he wandered in the corridors at night, and that he had come to her room at 3.10 this morning.

She had tracked him to Gosseberga fully intending to kill him. She had failed, with the result that Zalachenko was alive and tucked up in bed barely ten metres from where she was. And she was in hot water. She could not tell how bad the situation was, but she supposed that she would have to escape and discreetly disappear abroad herself if she did not want to risk being locked up in some nuthouse again with Teleborian as her warder.

The problem was that she could scarcely sit upright in bed. She did notice improvements. The headache was still there, but it came in waves instead of being constant. The pain in her left shoulder had subsided a bit, but it resurfaced whenever she tried to move.

She heard footsteps outside the door and saw a nurse open it to admit a woman wearing black trousers, a white blouse, and a dark jacket. She was a pretty, slender woman with dark hair and a boyish hairstyle. She radiated a cheerful confidence. She was carrying a black briefcase. Salander saw at once that she had the same eyes as Blomkvist.

“Hello, Lisbeth. I’m Annika Giannini,” she said. “May I come in?”

Salander studied her without expression. All of a sudden she did not have the slightest desire to meet Blomkvist’s sister and regretted that she had accepted this woman as her lawyer.

Giannini came in, shut the door behind her, and pulled up a chair. She sat there for some time, looking at her client.

The girl looked terrible. Her head was wrapped in bandages. She had purple bruises around her bloodshot eyes.

“Before we begin to discuss anything, I have to know whether you really do want me to be your lawyer. Normally I’m involved in civil cases in which I represent victims of rape or domestic violence. I’m not a criminal defence lawyer. I have, however, studied the details of your case, and I would very much like to represent you, if I may. I should also tell you that Mikael Blomkvist is my brother – I think you already know that – and that he and Dragan Armansky are paying my fee.”

She paused, but when she got no response she continued.

“If you want me to be your lawyer, it’s you I will be working for. Not for my brother or for Armansky. I have to tell you too that I will receive advice and support during any trial from your former guardian, Holger Palmgren. He’s a tough old boy, and he dragged himself out of his sickbed to help you.”

“Palmgren?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Yes.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s absolutely furious, but strangely he doesn’t seem to be at all worried about you.”

Salander smiled lopsidedly. It was the first time she had smiled at Sahlgrenska hospital.

“How are you feeling?”

“Like a sack of shit.”

“Well then. Do you want me to be your lawyer? Armansky and Mikael are paying my fee and –”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no?”

“I’ll pay your fee myself. I don’t want a single öre from Armansky or Kalle Blomkvist. But I can’t pay before I have access to the Internet.”

“I understand. We’ll deal with that problem when it arises. In any case, the state will be paying most of my salary. But do you want me to represent you?”

Salander gave a curt nod.

“Good. Then I’ll get started by giving you a message from Mikael. It sounds a little cryptic, but he says you’ll know what he means.”

“Oh?”

“He wants you to know that he’s told me most of the story, except for a few details, of which the first concerns the skills he discovered in Hedestad.”

He knows that I have a photographic memory… and that I’m a hacker. He’s kept quiet about that.

“O.K.”

“The other is the D.V.D. I don’t know what he’s referring to, but he was adamant that it’s up to you to decide whether you tell me about it or not. Do you know what he’s referring to?”

The film of Bjurman raping me.

“Yes.”

“That’s good, then.” Giannini was suddenly hesitant. “I’m a little miffed at my brother. Even though he hired me, he’ll only tell me what he feels like telling me. Do you intend to hide things from me too?”

“I don’t know. Could we leave that question for later?” Salander said.

“Certainly. We’re going to be talking to each other quite a lot. I don’t have time for a long conversation now – I have to meet Prosecutor Jervas in forty-five minutes. I just wanted to confirm that you really do want me to be your lawyer. But there’s something else I need to tell you.”

“Yes?”

“It’s this: if I’m not present, you’re not to say a single word to the police, no matter what they ask you. Even if they provoke you or accuse you of whatever… Can you promise me?”

“I could manage that.”

Gullberg had been completely exhausted after all his efforts on Monday. He did not wake until 9.00 on Tuesday morning, four hours later than usual. He went to the bathroom to shower and brush his teeth. He stood for a long time looking at his face in the mirror before he turned off the light and went to get dressed. He chose the only clean shirt he had left in the brown briefcase and put on a brown-patterned tie.

He went down to the hotel’s breakfast room, drank a cup of black coffee and ate a slice of wholemeal toast with cheese and a little marmalade on it. He drank a glass of mineral water.

Then he went to the hotel lobby and called Clinton’s mobile from the public telephone.

“It’s me. Status report?”

“Rather unsettled.”

“Fredrik, can you handle this?”

“Yes, it’s like the old days. But it’s a shame von Rottinger isn’t still with us. He was better at planning operations than I.”

“You were equally good. You could have switched places at any time. Which indeed you quite often did.”

“It’s a matter of intuition. He was always a little sharper.”

“Tell me, how are you all doing?”

“Sandberg is brighter than we thought. We brought in the external help in the form of Mårtensson. He’s a gofer, but he’s usable. We have taps on Blomkvist’s landline and mobile. We’ll take care of Giannini’s and the Millennium office telephones today. We’re looking at the blueprints for all the relevant offices and apartments. We’ll be going in as soon as it can be done.”

“First thing is to locate all the copies…”

“I’ve already done that. We’ve had some unbelievable luck. Giannini called Blomkvist this morning. She actually asked him how many copies there were in circulation, and it turned out that Blomkvist only has one. Berger copied the report, but she sent the copy on to Bublanski.”

“Good. No time to waste.”

“I know. But it has to be done in one fell swoop. If we don’t lift all the copies simultaneously, it won’t work.”

“True.”

“It’s a bit complicated, since Giannini left for Göteborg this morning. I’ve sent a team of externals to tail her. They’re flying down right now.”

“Good.” Gullberg could not think of anything more to say. “Thanks, Fredrik,” he said at last.

“My pleasure. This is a lot more fun than sitting around waiting for a kidney.”

They said goodbye. Gullberg paid his hotel bill and went out to the street. The ball was in motion. Now it was just a matter of mapping out the moves.

He started by walking to Park Avenue Hotel, where he asked to use the fax machine. He did not want to do it at the hotel where he had been staying. He faxed copies of the letters he had written the day before. Then he went out on to Avenyn to look for a taxi. He stopped at a rubbish bin and tore up the photocopies of his letters.

Giannini was with Prosecutor Jervas for fifteen minutes. She wanted to know what charges she was intending to bring against Salander, but she soon realized that Jervas was not yet sure of her plan.

“Right now I’ll settle for charges of grievous bodily harm or attempted murder. I refer to the fact that Salander hit her father with an axe. I take it that you will plead self-defence?”

“Maybe.”

“To be honest with you, Niedermann is my priority at the moment.”

“I understand.”

“I’ve been in touch with the Prosecutor General. Discussions are ongoing as to whether to combine all the charges against your client under the jurisdiction of a prosecutor in Stockholm and tie them in with what happened here.”

“I assumed that the case would be handled in Stockholm,” Giannini said.

“Fine. But I need an opportunity to question the girl. When can we do that?”

“I have a report from her doctor, Anders Jonasson. He says that Salander won’t be in a condition to participate in an interview for several days yet. Quite apart from her injuries, she’s on powerful painkillers.”

“I received a similar report, and as you no doubt realize, this is frustrating. I repeat that my priority is Niedermann. Your client says that she doesn’t know where he’s hiding.”

“She doesn’t know Niedermann at all. She happened to identify him and track him down to Gosseberga, to Zalachenko’s farm.”

“We’ll meet again as soon as your client is strong enough to be interviewed,” Jervas said.

Gullberg had a bunch of flowers in his hand when he got into the lift at Sahlgrenska hospital at the same time as a short-haired woman in a dark jacket. He held the lift door open for her and let her go first to the reception desk on the ward.

“My name is Annika Giannini. I’m a lawyer and I’d like to see my client again, Lisbeth Salander.”

Gullberg turned his head very slowly and looked in surprise at the woman he had followed out of the lift. He glanced down at her briefcase as the nurse checked Giannini’s I.D. and consulted a list.

“Room twelve,” the nurse said.

“Thank you. I know the way.” She walked off down the corridor.

“May I help you?”

“Thank you, yes. I’d like to leave these flowers for Karl Axel Bodin.”

“He’s not allowed visitors.”

“I know. I just want to leave the flowers.”

“We’ll take care of them.”

Gullberg had brought the flowers with him mainly as an excuse. He wanted to get an idea of how the ward was laid out. He thanked the nurse and followed the sign to the staircase. On the way he passed Zalachenko’s door, room fourteen according to Jonas Sandberg.

He waited in the stairwell. Through a glass pane in the door he saw the nurse take the bouquet into Zalachenko’s room. When she returned to her station, Gullberg pushed open the door to room fourteen and stepped quickly inside.

“Good morning, Alexander,” he said.

Zalachenko looked up in surprise at his unannounced visitor. “I thought you’d be dead by now,” he said.

“Not quite yet.”

“What do you want?”

“What do you think?”

Gullberg pulled up the chair and sat down.

“Probably to see me dead.”

“Well, that’s gratitude for you. How could you be so bloody stupid? We give you a whole new life and you finish up here.”

If Zalachenko could have laughed he would have. In his opinion, the Swedish Security Police were amateurs. That applied to Gullberg and equally to Björck. Not to mention that complete idiot Bjurman.

“Once again we have to haul you out of the furnace.”

The expression did not sit well with Zalachenko, once the victim of a petrol bomb attack – from that bloody daughter of his two doors down the corridor.

“Spare me the lectures. Just get me out of this mess.”

“That’s what I wanted to discuss with you.”

Gullberg put his briefcase on to his lap, took out a notebook, and turned to a blank page. Then he gave Zalachenko a long, searching look.

“There’s one thing I’m curious about… were you really going to betray us after all we’ve done for you?”

“What do you think?”

“It depends how crazy you are.”

“Don’t call me crazy. I’m a survivor. I do what I have to do to survive.”

Gullberg shook his head. “No, Alexander, you do what you do because you’re evil and rotten. You wanted a message from the Section. I’m here to deliver it. We’re not going to lift a finger to help you this time.”

All of a sudden Zalachenko looked uncertain. He studied Gullberg, trying to figure out if this was some puzzling bluff.

“You don’t have a choice,” he said.

“There’s always a choice,” Gullberg said.

“I’m going to –”

“You’re not going to do anything at all.”

Gullberg took a deep breath, unzipped the outside pocket of his case, and pulled out a 9 mm Smith&Wesson with a gold-plated butt. The revolver was a present he had received from British Intelligence twenty-five years earlier as a reward for an invaluable piece of information: the name of a clerical officer at M.I.5 who in good Philby style was working for the Russians.

Zalachenko looked astonished. Then he burst out laughing.

“And what are you going to do with that? Shoot me? You’ll spend the rest of your miserable life in prison.”

“I don’t think so.”

Zalachenko was suddenly very unsure whether Gullberg was bluffing.

“There’s going to be a scandal of enormous proportions.”

“Again, I don’t think so. There’ll be a few headlines, but in a week nobody will even remember the name Zalachenko.”

Zalachenko’s eyes narrowed.

“You’re a filthy swine,” Gullberg said then with such coldness in his voice that Zalachenko froze.

Gullberg squeezed the trigger and put the bullet right in the centre of Zalachenko’s forehead just as the patient was starting to swing his prosthesis over the edge of the bed. Zalachenko was thrown back on to the pillow. His good leg kicked four, five times before he was still. Gullberg saw a red flower-shaped splatter on the wall behind the bedhead. He became aware that his ears were ringing after the shot and he rubbed his left one with his free hand.

Then he stood up and put the muzzle to Zalachenko’s temple and squeezed the trigger twice. He wanted to be sure this time that the bastard really was dead.

Salander sat up with a start the instant she heard the first shot. Pain stabbed through her shoulder. When the next two shots came she tried to get her legs over the edge of the bed.

Giannini had only been there for a few minutes. She sat paralysed and tried to work out from which direction the sharp reports had come. She could tell from Salander’s reaction that something deadly was in the offing.

“Lie still,” she shouted. She put her hand on Salander’s chest and shoved her client down on to the bed.

Then Giannini crossed the room and pulled open the door. She saw two nurses running towards another room two doors away. The first nurse stopped short on the threshold. “No, don’t!” she screamed and then took a step back, colliding with the second nurse.

“He’s got a gun. Run!”

Giannini watched as the two nurses took cover in the room next to Salander’s.

The next moment she saw a thin, grey-haired man in a hound’s-tooth jacket walk into the corridor. He had a gun in his hand. Annika recognized him as the man who come up in the lift with her.

Then their eyes met. He appeared confused. He aimed the revolver at her and took a step forward. She pulled her head back in and slammed the door shut, looking around in desperation. A nurses’ table stood right next to her. She rolled it quickly over to the door and wedged the tabletop under the door handle.

She heard a movement and turned to see Salander just starting to clamber out of bed again. In a few quick steps she crossed the floor, wrapped her arms around her client and lifted her up. She tore electrodes and I.V. tubes loose as she carried her to the bathroom and set her on the toilet seat. Then she turned and locked the bathroom door. She dug her mobile out of her jacket pocket and dialled 112.

Gullberg went to Salander’s room and tried the door handle. It was blocked. He could not move it even a millimetre.

For a moment he stood indecisively outside the door. He knew that the lawyer Giannini was in the room, and he wondered if a copy of Björck’s report might be in her briefcase. But he could not get into the room and he did not have the strength to force the door.

That had not been part of the plan anyway. Clinton would take care of Giannini. Gullberg’s only job was Zalachenko.

He looked around the corridor and saw that he was being watched by nurses, patients and visitors. He raised the pistol and fired at a picture hanging on the wall at the end of the corridor. His spectators vanished as if by magic.

He glanced one last time at the door to Salander’s room. Then he walked decisively back to Zalachenko’s room and closed the door. He sat in the visitor’s chair and looked at the Russian defector who had been such an intimate part of his own life for so many years.

He sat still for almost ten minutes before he heard movement in the corridor and was aware that the police had arrived. By now he was not thinking of anything in particular.

Then he raised the revolver one last time, held it to his temple, and squeezed the trigger.

As the situation developed, the futility of attempting suicide in the middle of a hospital became apparent. Gullberg was transported at top speed to the hospital’s trauma unit, where Dr Jonasson received him and immediately initiated a battery of measures to maintain his vital functions.

For the second time in less than a week Jonasson performed emergency surgery, extracting a full-metal-jacketed bullet from human brain tissue. After a five-hour operation, Gullberg’s condition was critical. But he was still alive.

Yet Gullberg’s injuries were considerably more serious than those that Salander had sustained. He hovered between life and death for several days.

Blomkvist was at the Kaffebar on Hornsgatan when he heard on the radio that a 66-year-old unnamed man, suspected of attempting to murder the fugitive Lisbeth Salander, had been shot and killed at Sahlgrenska hospital in Göteborg. He left his coffee untouched, picked up his laptop case, and hurried off towards the editorial offices on Götgatan. He had crossed Mariatorget and was just turning up St Paulsgatan when his mobile beeped. He answered on the run.

“Blomkvist.”

“Hi, it’s Malin.”

“I heard the news. Do we know who the killer was?”

“Not yet. Henry is chasing it down.”

“I’m on the way in. Be there in five minutes.”

Blomkvist ran into Cortez at the entrance to the Millennium offices.

“Ekström’s holding a press conference at 3.00,” Cortez said. “I’m going to Kungsholmen now.”

“What do we know?” Blomkvist shouted after him.

“Ask Malin,” Cortez said, and was gone.

Blomkvist headed into Berger’s… wrong, Eriksson’s office. She was on the telephone and writing furiously on a yellow Post-it. She waved him away. Blomkvist went into the kitchenette and poured coffee with milk into two mugs marked with the logos of the K.D.U. and S.S.U. political parties. When he returned she had just finished her call. He gave her the S.S.U. mug.

“Right,” she said. “Zalachenko was shot dead at 1.15.” She looked at Blomkvist. “I just spoke to a nurse at Sahlgrenska. She says that the murderer was a man in his seventies, who arrived with flowers for Zalachenko minutes before the murder. He shot Zalachenko in the head several times and then shot himself. Zalachenko is dead. The murderer is just about alive and in surgery.”

Blomkvist breathed more easily. Ever since he had heard the news at the Kaffebar he had had his heart in his throat and a panicky feeling that Salander might have been the killer. That really would have thrown a spanner in the works.

“Do we have the name of the assailant?”

Eriksson shook her head as the telephone rang again. She took the call, and from the conversation Blomkvist gathered that it was a stringer in Göteborg whom Eriksson had sent to Sahlgrenska. He went to his own office and sat down.

It felt as if it was the first time in weeks that he had even been to his office. There was a pile of unopened post that he shoved firmly to one side. He called his sister.

“Giannini.”

“It’s Mikael. Did you hear what happened at Sahlgrenska?”

“You could say so.”

“Where are you?”

“At the hospital. That bastard aimed at me, too.”

Blomkvist sat speechless for several seconds before he fully took in what his sister had said.

“What on earth… you were there?”

“Yes. It was the most horrendous thing I’ve ever experienced.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No. But he tried to get into Lisbeth’s room. I blockaded the door and locked us in the bathroom.”

Blomkvist’s whole world suddenly felt off balance. His sister had almost…

“How is she?” he said.

“She’s not hurt. Or, I mean, she wasn’t hurt in today’s drama at least.”

He let that sink in.

“Annika, do you know anything at all about the murderer?”

“Not a thing. He was an older man, neatly dressed. I thought he looked rather bewildered. I’ve never seen him before, but I came up in the lift with him a few minutes before it all happened.”

“And Zalachenko is dead, no question?”

“Yes. I heard three shots, and according to what I’ve overheard he was shot in the head all three times. But it’s been utter chaos here, with a thousand policemen, and they’re evacuating a ward for acutely ill and injured patients who really ought not to be moved. When the police arrived one of them tried to question Lisbeth before they even bothered to ask what shape she’s in. I had to read them the riot act.”

Inspector Erlander saw Giannini through the doorway to Salander’s room. The lawyer had her mobile pressed to her ear, so he waited for her to finish her call.

Two hours after the murder there was still chaos in the corridor. Zalachenko’s room was sealed off. Doctors had tried resuscitation immediately after the shooting, but soon gave up. He was beyond all help. His body was sent to the pathologist, and the crime scene investigation proceeded as best it could under the circumstances.

Erlander’s mobile chimed. It was Fredrik Malmberg from the investigative team.

“We’ve got a positive I.D. on the murderer,” Malmberg said. “His name is Evert Gullberg and he’s seventy-eight years old.”

Seventy-eight. Quite elderly for a murderer.

“And who the hell is Evert Gullberg?”

“Retired. Lives in Laholm. Apparently he was a tax lawyer. I got a call from S.I.S. who told me that they had recently initiated a preliminary investigation against him.”

“When and why?”

“I don’t know when. But apparently he had a habit of sending crazy and threatening letters to people in government.”

“Such as who?”

“The Minister of Justice, for one.”

Erlander sighed. So, a madman. A fanatic.

“This morning Säpo got calls from several newspapers who had received letters from Gullberg. The Ministry of Justice also called, because Gullberg had made specific death threats against Karl Axel Bodin.”

“I want copies of the letters.”

“From Säpo?”

“Yes, damn it. Drive up to Stockholm and pick them up in person if necessary. I want them on my desk when I get back to H.Q. Which will be in about an hour.”

He thought for a second and then asked one more question.

“Was it Säpo that called you?”

“That’s what I told you.”

“I mean… they called you, not vice versa?”

“Exactly.”

Erlander closed his mobile.

He wondered what had got into Säpo to make them, out of the blue, feel the need to get in touch with the police – of their own accord. Ordinarily you couldn’t get a word out of them.

Wadensjöö flung open the door to the room at the Section where Clinton was resting. Clinton sat up cautiously.

“Just what the bloody hell is going on?” Wadensjöö shrieked. “Gullberg has murdered Zalachenko and then shot himself in the head.”

“I know,” Clinton said.

“You know?” Wadensjöö yelled. He was bright red in the face and looked as if he was about to have a stroke. “He shot himself, for Christ’s sake. He tried to commit suicide. Is he out of his mind?”

“You mean he’s alive?”

“For the time being, yes, but he has massive brain damage.”

Clinton sighed. “Such a shame,” he said with real sorrow in his voice.

“Shame?” Wadensjöö burst out. “Gullberg is out of his mind. Don’t you understand what –”

Clinton cut him off.

“Gullberg has cancer of the stomach, colon and bladder. He’s been dying for several months, and in the best case he had only a few months left.”

“Cancer?”

“He’s been carrying that gun around for the past six months, determined to use it as soon as the pain became unbearable and before the disease turned him into a vegetable. But he was able to do one last favour for the Section. He went out in grand style.”

Wadensjöö was almost beside himself. “You knew? You knew that he was thinking of killing Zalachenko?”

“Naturally. His assignment was to make sure that Zalachenko never got a chance to talk. And as you know, you couldn’t threaten or reason with that man.”

“But don’t you understand what a scandal this could turn into? Are you just as barmy as Gullberg?”

Clinton got to his feet laboriously. He looked Wadensjöö in the eye and handed him a stack of fax copies.

“It was an operational decision. I mourn for my friend, but I’ll probably be following him pretty soon. As far as a scandal goes… A retired tax lawyer wrote paranoid letters to newspapers, the police, and the Ministry of Justice. Here’s a sample of them. Gullberg blames Zalachenko for everything from the Palme assassination to trying to poison the Swedish people with chlorine. The letters are plainly the work of a lunatic and were illegible in places, with capital letters, underlining, and exclamation marks. I especially like the way he wrote in the margin.”

Wadensjöö read the letters with rising astonishment. He put a hand to his brow.

Clinton said: “Whatever happens, Zalachenko’s death will have nothing to do with the Section. It was just some demented pensioner who fired the shots.” He paused. “The important thing is that, starting from now, you have to get on board with the program. And don’t rock the boat.” He fixed his gaze on Wadensjöö. There was steel in the sick man’s eyes. “What you have to understand is that the Section functions as the spear head for the total defence of the nation. We’re Sweden’s last line of defence. Our job is to watch over the security of our country. Everything else is unimportant.”

Wadensjöö regarded Clinton with doubt in his eyes.

“We’re the ones who don’t exist,” Clinton went on. “We’re the ones nobody will ever thank. We’re the ones who have to make the decisions that nobody else wants to make. Least of all the politicians.” His voice quivered with contempt as he spoke those last words. “Do as I say and the Section might survive. For that to happen, we have to be decisive and resort to tough measures.”

Wadensjöö felt the panic rise.

Cortez wrote feverishly, trying to get down every word that was said from the podium at the police press office at Kungsholmen. Prosecutor Ekström had begun. He explained that it had been decided that the investigation into the police killing in Gosseberga – for which Ronald Niedermann was being sought – would be placed under the jurisdiction of a prosecutor in Göteborg. The rest of the investigation concerning Niedermann would be handled by Ekström himself. Niedermann was a suspect in the murders of Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson. No mention was made of Advokat Bjurman. Ekström had also to investigate and bring charges against Lisbeth Salander, who was under suspicion for a long list of crimes.

He explained that he had decided to go public with the information in the light of events that had occurred in Göteborg that day, including the fact that Salander’s father, Karl Axel Bodin, had been shot dead. The immediate reason for calling the press conference was that he wanted to deny the rumours already being circulated in the media. He had himself received a number of calls concerning these rumours.

“Based on current information, I am able to tell you that Karl Axel Bodin’s daughter, who is being held for the attempted murder of her father, had nothing to do with this morning’s events.”

“Then who was the murderer?” a reporter from Dagens Eko shouted.

“The man who at 1.15 today fired the fatal shots at Karl Axel Bodin before attempting to commit suicide has now been identified. He is a 78-year-old man who has been undergoing treatment for a terminal illness and the psychiatric problems associated with it.”

“Does he have any connection to Lisbeth Salander?”

“No. The man is a tragic figure who evidently acted alone, in accordance with his own paranoid delusions. The Security Police recently initiated an investigation of this man because he had written a number of apparently unstable letters to well-known politicians and the media. As recently as this morning, newspaper and government offices received letters in which he threatened to kill Karl Axel Bodin.”

“Why didn’t the police give Bodin protection?”

“The letters naming Bodin were sent only last night and thus arrived at the same time as the murder was being committed. There was no time to act.”

“What’s the killer’s name?”

“We will not give out that information until his next of kin have been notified.”

“What sort of background does he have?”

“As far as I understand, he previously worked as an accountant and tax lawyer. He has been retired for fifteen years. The investigation is still under way, but as you can appreciate from the letters he sent, it is a tragedy that could have been prevented if there had been more support within society.”

“Did he threaten anyone else?”

“I have been advised that he did, yes, but I do not have any details to pass on to you.”

“What will this mean for the case against Salander?”

“For the moment, nothing. We have Karl Axel Bodin’s own testimony from the officers who interviewed him, and we have extensive forensic evidence against her.”

“What about the reports that Bodin tried to murder his daughter?”

“That is under investigation, but there are strong indications that he did indeed attempt to kill her. As far as we can determine at the moment, it was a case of deep antagonism in a tragically dysfunctional family.”

Cortez scratched his ear. He noticed that the other reporters were taking notes as feverishly as he was.

Gunnar Björck felt an almost unquenchable panic when he heard the news about the shooting at Sahlgrenska hospital. He had terrible pain in his back.

It took him an hour to make up his mind. Then he picked up the telephone and tried to call his old protector in Laholm. There was no answer.

He listened to the news and heard a summary of what had been said at the press conference. Zalachenko had been shot by a 78-year-old tax specialist.

Good Lord, seventy-eight years old.

He tried again to call Gullberg, but again in vain.

Finally his uneasiness took the upper hand. He could not stay in the borrowed summer cabin in Smådalarö. He felt vulnerable and exposed. He needed time and space to think. He packed clothes, painkillers, and his wash bag. He did not want to use his own telephone, so he limped to the telephone booth at the grocer’s to call Landsort and book himself a room in the old ships’ pilot lookout. Landsort was the end of the world, and few people would look for him there. He booked the room for two weeks.

He glanced at his watch. He would have to hurry to make the last ferry. He went back to the cabin as fast as his aching back would permit. He made straight for the kitchen and checked that the coffee machine was turned off. Then he went to the hall to get his bag. He happened to look into the living room and stopped short in surprise.

At first he could not grasp what he was seeing.

In some mysterious way the ceiling lamp had been taken down and placed on the coffee table. In its place hung a rope from a hook, right above a stool that was usually in the kitchen.

Björck looked at the noose, failing to understand.

Then he heard movement behind him and felt his knees buckle.

Slowly he turned to look.

Two men stood there. They were southern European, by the look of them. He had no will to react when calmly they took him in a firm grip under both arms, lifted him off the ground, and carried him to the stool. When he tried to resist, pain shot like a knife through his back. He was almost paralysed as he felt himself being lifted on to the stool.

Sandberg was accompanied by a man who went by the nickname of Falun and who in his youth had been a professional burglar. He had, in time, retrained as a locksmith. Hans von Rottinger had first hired Falun for the Section in 1986 for an operation that involved forcing entry into the home of the leader of an anarchist group. After that, Falun had been hired from time to time until the mid-’90s, when there was less demand for this type of operation. Early that morning Clinton had revived the contact and given Falun an assignment. Falun would make 10,000 kronor tax-free for a job that would take about ten minutes. In return he had pledged not to steal anything from the apartment that was the target of the operation. The Section was not a criminal enterprise, after all.

Falun did not know exactly what interests Clinton represented, but he assumed it had something to do with the military. He had read Jan Guillou’s books, and he did not ask any questions. But it felt good to be back in the saddle again after so many years of silence from his former employer.

His job was to open the door. He was expert at breaking and entering. Even so, it still took five minutes to force the lock to Blomkvist’s apartment. Then Falun waited on the landing as Sandberg went in.

“I’m in,” Sandberg said into a handsfree mobile.

“Good,” Clinton said into his earpiece. “Take your time. Tell me what you see.”

“I’m in the hall with a wardrobe and hat-rack on my right. Bathroom on the left. Otherwise there’s one very large room, about fifty square metres. There’s a small kitchen alcove at the far end on the right.”

“Is there any desk or…”

“He seems to work at the kitchen table or sitting on the living-room sofa… wait.”

Clinton waited.

“Yes. Here we are, a folder on the kitchen table. And Björck’s report is in it. It looks like the original.”

“Very good. Anything else of interest on the table?”

“Books. P.G. Vinge’s memoirs. Power Struggle for Säpo by Erik Magnusson. Four or five more of the same.”

“Is there a computer?”

“No.”

“Any safe?”

“No… not that I can see.”

“Take your time. Go through the apartment centimetre by centimetre. Mårtensson reports that Blomkvist is still at the office. You’re wearing gloves, right?”

“Of course.”

Erlander had a chat with Giannini in a brief interlude between one or other or both of them talking on their mobiles. He went into Salander’s room and held out his hand to introduce himself. Then he said hello to Salander and asked her how she was feeling. Salander looked at him, expressionless. He turned to Giannini.

“I need to ask some questions.”

“Alright.”

“Can you tell me what happened this morning?”

Giannini related what she had seen and heard and how she had reacted up until the moment she had barricaded herself with Salander in the bathroom. Erlander glanced at Salander and then back to her lawyer.

“So you’re sure that he came to the door of this room?”

“I heard him trying to push down the door handle.”

“And you’re perfectly sure about that? It’s not difficult to imagine things when you’re scared or excited.”

“I definitely heard him at the door. He had seen me and pointed his pistol at me, he knew that this was the room I was in.”

“Do you have any reason to believe that he had planned, beforehand that is, to shoot you too?”

“I have no way of knowing. When he took aim at me I pulled my head back in and blockaded the door.”

“Which was the sensible thing to do. And it was even more sensible of you to carry your client to the bathroom. These doors are so thin that the bullets would have gone clean through them if he had fired. What I’m trying to figure out is whether he wanted to attack you personally or whether he was just reacting to the fact that you were looking at him. You were the person nearest to him in the corridor.”

“Apart from the two nurses.”

“Did you get the sense that he knew you or perhaps recognized you?”

“No, not really.”

“Could he have recognized you from the papers? You’ve had a lot of publicity over several widely reported cases.”

“It’s possible. I can’t say.”

“And you’d never seen him before?”

“I’d seen him in the lift, that’s the first time I set eyes on him.”

“I didn’t know that. Did you talk?”

“No. I got in at the same time he did. I was vaguely aware of him for just a few seconds. He had flowers in one hand and a briefcase in the other.”

“Did you make eye contact?”

“No. He was looking straight ahead.”

“Who got in first?”

“We got in more or less at the same time.”

“Did he look confused or –”

“I couldn’t say one way or the other. He got into the lift and stood perfectly still, holding the flowers.”

“What happened then?”

“We got out of the lift on the same floor, and I went to visit my client.”

“Did you come straight here?”

“Yes… no. That is, I went to the reception desk and showed my I.D. The prosecutor has forbidden my client to have visitors.”

“Where was this man then?”

Giannini hesitated. “I’m not quite sure. He was behind me, I think. No, wait… he got out of the lift first, but stopped and held the door for me. I couldn’t swear to it, but I think he went to the reception desk too. I was just quicker on my feet than he was. But the nurses would know.”

Elderly, polite, and a murderer, Erlander thought.

“Yes, he did go to the reception desk,” he confirmed. “He did talk to the nurse and he left the flowers at the desk, at her instruction. But you didn’t see that?”

“No. I have no recollection of any of that.”

Erlander had no more questions. Frustration was gnawing at him. He had had the feeling before and had trained himself to interpret it as an alarm triggered by instinct. Something was eluding him, something that was not right.

The murderer had been identified as Evert Gullberg, a former accountant and sometime business consultant and tax lawyer. A man in advanced old age. A man against whom Säpo had lately initiated a preliminary investigation because he was a nutter who wrote threatening letters to public figures.

Erlander knew from long experience that there were plenty of nutters out there, some pathologically obsessed ones who stalked celebrities and looked for love by hiding in woods near their villas. When their love was not reciprocated – as why would it be? – it could quickly turn to violent hatred. There were stalkers who travelled from Germany or Italy to follow a 21-year-old lead singer in a pop band from gig to gig, and who then got upset because she would not drop everything to start a relationship with them. There were bloody-minded individuals who harped on and on about real or imaginary injustices and who sometimes turned to threatening behaviour. There were psychopaths and conspiracy theorists, nutters who had the gift to read messages hidden from the normal world.

There were plenty of examples of these fools taking the leap from fantasy to action. Was not the assassination of Anna Lindh[3] the result of precisely such a crazy impulse?

But Inspector Erlander did not like the idea that a mentally ill accountant, or whatever he was, could wander into a hospital with a bunch of flowers in one hand and a pistol in the other. Or that he could, for God’s sake, execute someone who was the object of a police investigation – his investigation. A man whose name in the public register was Karl Axel Bodin but whose real name, according to Blomkvist, was Zalachenko. A bastard defected Soviet Russian agent and professional gangster.

At the very least Zalachenko was a witness; but in the worst case he was involved up to his neck in a series of murders. Erlander had been allowed to conduct two brief interviews with Zalachenko, and at no time during either had he been swayed by the man’s protestations of innocence.

His murderer had shown interest also in Salander, or at least in her lawyer. He had tried to get into her room.

And then he had attempted suicide. According to the doctors, he had probably succeeded, even if his body had not yet absorbed the message that it was time to shut down. It was highly unlikely that Evert Gullberg would ever be brought before a court.

Erlander did not like the situation, not for a moment. But he had no proof that Gullberg’s shots had been anything other than what they seemed. So he had decided to play it safe. He looked at Giannini.

“I’ve decided that Salander should be moved to a different room. There’s a room in the connecting corridor to the right of the reception area that would be better from a security point of view. It’s in direct line-of-sight of the reception desk and the nurses’ station. No visitors will be permitted other than you. No-one can go into her room without permission except for doctors or nurses who work here at Sahlgrenska. And I’ll see to it that a guard is stationed outside her door round the clock.”

“Do you think she’s in danger?”

“I know of nothing to indicate that she is. But I want to play it safe.”

Salander listened attentively to the conversation between her lawyer and her adversary, a member of the police. She was impressed that Giannini had replied so precisely and lucidly, and in such detail. She was even more impressed by her lawyer’s way of keeping cool under stress.

Otherwise she had had a monstrous headache ever since Giannini had dragged her out of bed and carried her into the bathroom. Instinctively she wanted as little as possible to do with the hospital staff. She did not like asking for help or showing any sign of weakness. But the headaches were so overpowering that she could not think straight. She reached out and rang for a nurse.

Giannini had planned her visit to Göteborg as a brisk, necessary prologue to long-term work. She wanted to get to know Salander, question her about her actual condition, and present a first outline of the strategy that she and Blomkvist had cobbled together to deal with the legal proceedings. She had originally intended to return to Stockholm that evening, but the dramatic events at Sahlgrenska had meant that she still had not had a real conversation with Salander. Her client was in much worse shape than she had been led to believe. She was suffering from acute headaches and a high fever, which prompted a doctor by the name of Endrin to prescribe a strong painkiller, an antibiotic, and rest. Consequently, as soon as her client had been moved to a new room and a security guard had been posted outside, Giannini was asked, quite firmly, to leave.

It was already 4.30 p.m. She hesitated. She could go back to Stockholm knowing that she might have to take the train to Göteborg again as soon as the following day. Or else she could stay overnight. But her client might be too ill to deal with a visit tomorrow as well. She had not booked a hotel room. As a lawyer who mainly represented abused women without any great financial resources, she tried to avoid padding her bill with expensive hotel charges. She called home first and then rang Lillian Josefsson, a lawyer colleague who was a member of the Women’s Network and an old friend from law school.

“I’m in Göteborg,” she said. “I was thinking of going home tonight, but certain things happened today that require me to stay overnight. Is it O.K. if I sleep at your place?”

“Oh, please do, that would be fun. We haven’t seen each other in ages.”

“I’m not interrupting anything?”

“No, of course not. But I’ve moved. I’m now on a side street off Linnégatan. But I do have a spare room. And we can go out to a bar later if we feel like it.”

“If I have the energy,” Giannini said. “What time is good?”

They agreed that Giannini should turn up at around 6.00.

Giannini took the bus to Linnégatan and spent the next hour in a Greek restaurant. She was famished, and ordered a shish kebab with salad. She sat for a long time thinking about the day’s events. She was a little shaky now that the adrenaline had worn off, but she was pleased with herself. In a time of great danger she had been cool, calm and collected. She had instinctively made the right decisions. It was a pleasant feeling to know that her reactions were up to an emergency.

After a while she took her Filofax from her briefcase and opened it to the notes section. She read through it carefully. She was filled with doubt about the plan that her brother had outlined to her. It had sounded logical at the time, but it did not look so good now. Even so, she did not intend to back out.

At 6.00 she paid her bill and walked to Lillian’s place on Olivedalsgatan. She punched in the door code her friend had given her. She stepped into the stairwell and was looking for a light switch when the attack came out of the blue. She was slammed up against a tiled wall next to the door. She banged her head hard, felt a rush of pain and fell to the ground.

The next moment she heard footsteps moving swiftly away and then the front door opening and closing. She struggled to her feet and put her hand to her forehead. There was blood on her palm. What the hell? She went out on to the street and just caught a glimpse of someone turning the corner towards Sveaplan. In shock she stood still for about a minute. Then she walked back to the door and punched in the code again.

Suddenly she realized that her briefcase was gone. She had been robbed. It took a few seconds before the horror of it sank in. Oh no. The Zalachenko folder. She felt the alarm spreading up from her diaphragm.

Slowly she sat down on the staircase.

Then she jumped up and dug into her jacket pocket. The Filofax. Thank God. Leaving the restaurant she had stuffed it into her pocket instead of putting it back in her briefcase. It contained the draft of her strategy in the Salander case, point by detailed point.

Then she stumbled up the stairs to the fifth floor and pounded on her friend’s door.

Half an hour had passed before she had recovered enough to call her brother. She had a black eye and a gash above her eyebrow that was still bleeding. Lillian had cleaned it with alcohol and put a bandage on it. No, she did not want to go to hospital. Yes, she would like a cup of tea. Only then did she begin to think rationally again. The first thing she did was to call Blomkvist.

He was still at Millennium, where he was searching for information about Zalachenko’s murderer with Cortez and Eriksson. He listened with increasing dismay to Giannini’s account of what had happened.

“No bones broken?” he said.

“Black eye. I’ll be O.K. after I’ve had a chance to calm down.”

“Did you disturb a robbery, was that it?”

“Mikael, my briefcase was stolen, with the Zalachenko report you gave me.”

“Not a problem. I can make another copy –”

He broke off as he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. First Zalachenko. Now Annika.

He closed his iBook, stuffed it into his shoulder bag and left the office without a word, moving fast. He jogged home to Bellmansgatan and up the stairs.

The door was locked.

As soon as he entered the apartment he saw that the folder he had left on the kitchen table was gone. He did not even bother to look for it. He knew exactly where it had been. He sank on to a chair at the kitchen table as thoughts whirled through his head.

Someone had been in his apartment. Someone who was trying to cover Zalachenko’s tracks.

His own copy and his sister’s copy were gone.

Bublanski still had the report.

Or did he?

Blomkvist got up and went to the telephone, but stopped with his hand on the receiver. Someone had been in his apartment. He looked at his telephone with the utmost suspicion and took out his mobile.

But how easy is it to eavesdrop on a mobile conversation?

He slowly put the mobile down next to his landline and looked around.

I’m dealing with pros here, obviously. People who could bug an apartment as easily as get into one without breaking a lock.

He sat down again.

He looked at his laptop case.

How hard is it to hack into my email? Salander can do it in five minutes.

He thought for a long time before he went back to the landline and called his sister. He chose his words with care.

“How are you doing?”

“I’m fine, Micke.”

“Tell me what happened from the moment you arrived at Sahlgrenska until you were attacked.”

It took ten minutes for Giannini to give him her account. Blomkvist did not say anything about the implications of what she told him, but asked questions until he was satisfied. He sounded like an anxious brother, but his mind was working on a completely different level as he reconstructed the key points.

She had decided to stay in Göteborg at 4.30 that afternoon. She called her friend on her mobile, got the address and door code. The robber was waiting for her inside the stairwell at 6.00 on the dot.

Her mobile was being monitored. It was the only possible explanation.

Which meant that his was being monitored too.

Foolish to think otherwise.

“And the Zalachenko report is gone,” Giannini repeated.

Blomkvist hesitated. Whoever had stolen the report already knew that his copy too had been stolen. It would only be natural to mention that.

“Mine too,” he said.

“What?”

He explained that he had come home to find that the blue folder on his kitchen table was gone.

“It’s a disaster,” he said in a gloomy voice. “That was the crucial part of the evidence.”

“Micke… I’m so sorry.”

“Me too,” Blomkvist said. “Damn it! But it’s not your fault. I should have published the report the day I got it.”

“What do we do now?”

“I have no idea. This is the worst thing that could have happened. It will turn our whole plan upside down. We don’t have a shred of evidence left against Björck or Teleborian.”

They talked for another two minutes before Blomkvist ended the conversation.

“I want you to come back to Stockholm tomorrow,” he said.

“I have to see Salander.”

“Go and see her in the morning. We have to sit down and think about where we go from here.”

When Blomkvist hung up he sat on the sofa staring into space. Whoever was listening to their conversation knew now that Millennium had lost Björck’s report along with the correspondence between Björck and Dr Teleborian. They could be satisfied that Blomkvist and Giannini were in despair.

If nothing else, Blomkvist had learned from the preceding night’s study of the history of the Security Police that disinformation was the basis of all espionage activity. And he had just planted disinformation that in the long run might prove invaluable.

He opened his laptop case and took out the copy made for Armansky which he had not yet managed to deliver. The only remaining copy, and he did not intend to waste it. On the contrary, he would make five more copies and put them in safe places.

Then he called Eriksson. She was about to lock up for the day.

“Where did you disappear to in such a hurry?” she said.

“Could you hang on there a few minutes please? There’s something I have to discuss with you before you leave.”

He had not had time to do his laundry for several weeks. All his shirts were in the basket. He packed a razor and Power Struggle for Säpo along with the last remaining copy of Björck’s report. He went to Dressman and bought four shirts, two pairs of trousers and some underwear and took the clothes with him to the office. Eriksson waited while he took a quick shower, wondering what was going on.

“Someone broke into my apartment and stole the Zalachenko report. Someone mugged Annika in Göteborg and stole her copy. I have proof that her phone is tapped, which may well mean that mine is too. Maybe yours at home and all the Millennium phones have been bugged. And if someone took the trouble to break into my apartment, they’d be pretty dim if they didn’t bug it as well.”

“I see,” said Eriksson in a flat voice. She glanced at the mobile on the desk in front of her.

“Keep working as usual. Use the mobile, but don’t give away any information. Tomorrow, tell Henry.”

“He went home an hour ago. He left a stack of public reports on your desk. But what are you doing here?”

“I plan to sleep here tonight. If they shot Zalachenko, stole the reports, and bugged my apartment today, there’s a good chance they’ve just got started and haven’t done the office yet. People have been here all day. I don’t want the office to be empty tonight.”

“You think that the murder of Zalachenko… but the murderer was a geriatric psycho.”

“Malin, I don’t believe in coincidence. Somebody is covering Zalachenko’s tracks. I don’t care who people think that old lunatic was or how many crazy letters he wrote to government ministers. He was a hired killer of some sort. He went there to kill Zalachenko… and maybe Lisbeth too.”

“But he committed suicide, or tried to. What hired killer would do that?”

Blomkvist thought for a moment. He met the editor-in-chief’s gaze.

“Maybe someone who’s seventy-eight and hasn’t much to lose. He’s mixed up in all this, and when we finish digging we’ll prove it.”

Eriksson studied Blomkvist’s face. She had never before seen him so composed and unflinching. She shuddered. Blomkvist noticed her reaction.

“One more thing. We’re no longer in a battle with a gang of criminals, this time it’s with a government department. It’s going to be tough.”

Eriksson nodded.

“I didn’t imagine things would go this far. Malin… what happened today makes very plain how dangerous this could get. If you want out, just say the word.”

She wondered what Berger would have said. Then stubbornly she shook her head.