The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

CHAPTER 16

Blomkvist left the Millennium offices at 10.30 on Friday night. He took the stairs down to the ground floor, but instead of going out on to the street he turned left and went through the basement, across the inner courtyard, and through the building behind theirs on to Hökens Gata. He ran into a group of youths on their way from Mosebacke, but saw no-one who seemed to be paying him any attention. Anyone watching the building would think that he was spending the night at Millennium, as he often did. He had established that pattern as early as April. Actually it was Malm who had the night shift.

He spent fifteen minutes walking down the alleys and boulevards around Mosebacke before he headed for Fiskargatan 9. He opened the entrance door using the code and took the stairs to the top-floor apartment, where he used Salander’s keys to get in. He turned off the alarm. He always felt a bit bemused when he went into the apartment: twenty-one rooms, of which only three were furnished.

He began by making coffee and sandwiches before he went into Salander’s office and booted up her PowerBook.

From the moment in mid-April when Björck’s report was stolen and Blomkvist realized that he was under surveillance, he had established his own headquarters at Salander’s apartment. He had transferred the most crucial documentation to her desk. He spent several nights a week at the apartment, slept in her bed, and worked on her computer. She had wiped her hard drive clean before she left for Gosseberga and the confrontation with Zalachenko. Blomkvist supposed that she had not planned to come back. He had used her system disks to restore her computer to a functioning state.

Since April he had not even plugged in the broadband cable to his own machine. He logged on to her broadband connection, started up the I.C.Q. chat program, and pinged up the address she had created for him through the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table].

Ping.

Blomkvist smiled.

Blomkvist logged in to I.C.Q. and went into the newly created Yahoo group [The_Knights]. All he found was a link from Plague to an anonymous U.R.L. which consisted solely of numbers. He copied the address into Explorer, hit the return key, and came to a website somewhere on the Internet that contained the sixteen gigabytes of Ekström’s hard drive.

Plague had obviously made it simple for himself by copying over Ekström’s entire hard drive, and Blomkvist spent more than an hour sorting through its contents. He ignored the system files, software and endless files containing preliminary investigations that seemed to stretch back several years. He downloaded four folders. Three of them were called [PrelimInv/Salander], [Slush/Salander], and [PrelimInv/Niedermann]. The fourth was a copy of Ekström’s email folder made at 2.00 p.m. the previous day.

“Thanks, Plague,” Blomkvist said to himself.

He spent three hours reading through Ekström’s preliminary investigation and strategy for the trial. Not surprisingly, much of it dealt with Salander’s mental state. Ekström wanted an extensive psychiatric examination and had sent a lot of messages with the object of getting her transferred to Kronoberg prison as a matter of urgency.

Blomkvist could tell that Ekström’s search for Niedermann was making no headway. Bublanski was the leader of that investigation. He had succeeding in gathering some forensic evidence linking Niedermann to the murders of Svensson and Johansson, as well as to the murder of Bjurman. Blomkvist’s own three long interviews in April had set them on the trail of this evidence. If Niedermann were ever apprehended, Blomkvist would have to be a witness for the prosecution. At long last D.N.A. from sweat droplets and two hairs from Bjurman’s apartment were matched to items from Niedermann’s room in Gosseberga. The same D.N.A. was found in abundant quantities on the remains of Svavelsjö M.C.’s Göransson.

On the other hand, Ekström had remarkably little on the record about Zalachenko.

Blomkvist lit a cigarette and stood by the window looking out towards Djurgården.

Ekström was leading two separate preliminary investigations. Criminal Inspector Faste was the investigative leader in all matters dealing with Salander. Bublanski was working only on Niedermann.

When the name Zalachenko turned up in the preliminary investigation, the logical thing for Ekström to do would have been to contact the general director of the Security Police to determine who Zalachenko actually was. Blomkvist could find no such enquiry in Ekström’s email, journal or notes. But among the notes Blomkvist found several cryptic sentences.

The Salander investigation is fake. Björck’s original doesn’t match Blomkvist’s version. Classify TOP SECRET.

Then a series of notes claiming that Salander was paranoid and a schizophrenic.

Correct to lock up Salander 1991.

He found what linked the investigations in the Salander slush, that is, the supplementary information that the prosecutor considered irrelevant to the preliminary investigation, and which would therefore not be presented at the trial or make up part of the chain of evidence against her. This included almost everything that had to do with Zalachenko’s background.

The investigation was totally inadequate.

Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence and to what extent it was contrived. Where was the boundary? And was Ekström aware that there was a boundary?

Could it be that someone was deliberately supplying Ekström with believable but misleading information?

Finally Blomkvist logged into hotmail and spent ten minutes checking the half-dozen anonymous email accounts he had created. Each day he had checked the address he had given to Criminal Inspector Modig. He had no great hope that she would contact him, so he was mildly surprised when he opened the inbox and found an email from ressallskap9april@hotmail.com›. The message consisted of a single line:

Plague pinged Salander at midnight and interrupted her in the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time with Holger Palmgren as her guardian. She cast an irritated glance at the display.

She sat up in bed and looked eagerly at the screen of her Palm.

Plague gave her the U.R.L. of the server where he kept Teleborian’s hard drive.

Salander disconnected from Plague and accessed the server he had directed her to. She spent nearly three hours scrutinizing folder after folder on Teleborian’s computer.

She found correspondence between Teleborian and a person with a hotmail address who sent encrypted mail. Since she had access to Teleborian’s P.G.P. key, she easily decoded the correspondence. His name was Jonas, no last name. Jonas and Teleborian had an unhealthy interest in seeing that Salander did not thrive.

Yes… we can prove that there is a conspiracy.

But what really interested Salander were the forty-seven folders containing close to nine thousand photographs of explicit child pornography. She clicked on image after image of children aged about fifteen or younger. A number of pictures were of infants. The majority were of girls. Many of them were sadistic.

She found links to at least a dozen people abroad who traded child porn with each other.

Salander bit her lip, but her face was otherwise expressionless.

She remembered the nights when, as a twelve-year-old, she had been strapped down in a stimulus-free room at St Stefan’s. Teleborian had come into the room again and again to look at her in the glow of the nightlight.

She knew. He had never touched her, but she had always known.

She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.

After a while she pinged Blomkvist on I.C.Q.

Blomkvist spent the night at Salander’s apartment on Fiskargatan. He did not shut down the computer until 6.30 a.m. and fell asleep with photographs of gross child pornography whirling through his mind. He woke at 10.15 and rolled out of Salander’s bed, showered, and called a taxi to pick him up outside Södra theatre. He got out at Birger Jarlsgatan at 10.55 and walked to Café Madeleine.

Modig was waiting for him with a cup of black coffee in front of her.

“Hi,” Blomkvist said.

“I’m taking a big risk here,” she said without greeting.

“Nobody will hear of our meeting from me.”

She seemed stressed.

“One of my colleagues recently went to see former Prime Minister Fälldin. He went there off his own bat, and his job is on the line now too.”

“I understand.”

“I need a guarantee of anonymity for both of us.”

“I don’t even know which colleague you’re talking about.”

“I’ll tell you later. I want you to promise to give him protection as a source.”

“You have my word.”

She looked at her watch.

“Are you in a hurry?”

“Yes. I have to meet my husband and kids at the Sturegalleria in ten minutes. He thinks I’m still at work.”

“And Bublanski knows nothing about this?”

“No.”

“Right. You and your colleague are sources and you have complete source protection. Both of you. As long as you live.”

“My colleague is Jerker Holmberg. You met him down in Göteborg. His father is a Centre Party member, and Jerker has known Prime Minister Fälldin since he was a child. He seems to be pleasant enough. So Jerker went to see him and asked about Zalachenko.”

Blomkvist’s heart began to pound.

“Jerker asked what he knew about the defection, but Fälldin didn’t reply. When Holmberg told him that we suspect that Salander was locked up by the people who were protecting Zalachenko, well, that really upset him.”

“Did he say how much he knew?”

“Fälldin told him that the chief of Säpo at the time and a colleague came to visit him very soon after he became Prime Minister. They told a fantastic story about a Russian defector who had come to Sweden, told him that it was the most sensitive military secret Sweden possessed… that there was nothing in Swedish military intelligence that was anywhere near as important. Fälldin said that he hadn’t known how he should handle it, that there was no-one with much experience in government, the Social Democrats having been in power for more than forty years. He was advised that he alone had to make the decisions, and that if he discussed it with his government colleagues then Säpo would wash their hands of it. He remembered the whole thing as having been very unpleasant.”

“What did he do?”

“He realized that he had no choice but to do what the gentlemen from Säpo were proposing. He issued a directive putting Säpo in sole charge of the defector. He undertook never to discuss the matter with anyone. Fälldin was never told Zalachenko’s name.”

“Extraordinary.”

“After that he heard almost nothing more during his two terms in office. But he had done something extremely shrewd. He had insisted that an Undersecretary of State be let in on the secret, in case there was a need for a go-between for the government secretariat and those who were protecting Zalachenko.”

“Did he remember who it was?”

“It was Bertil K. Janeryd, now Swedish ambassador in the Hague. When it was explained to Fälldin how serious this preliminary investigation was, he sat down and wrote to Janeryd.”

Modig pushed an envelope across the table.

“This letter is referring to Holmberg?”

“No. Jerker asked Fälldin not to put a name. He said that he couldn’t know who would be going to the Hague.” “You mean…”

“Jerker and I have discussed it. We’re already out on ice so thin that we’ll need paddles rather than ice picks. We have no authority to travel to Holland to interview the ambassador. But you could do it.”

Blomkvist folded the letter and was putting it into his jacket pocket when Modig grabbed his hand. Her grip was hard.

“Information for information,” she said. “We want to hear everything Janeryd tells you.”

Blomkvist nodded. Modig stood up.

“Hang on. You said that Fälldin was visited by two people from Säpo. One was the chief of Säpo. Who was the other?”

“Fälldin met him only on that one occasion and couldn’t remember his name. No notes were taken at the meeting. He remembered him as thin with a narrow moustache. But he did recall that the man was introduced as the boss of the Section for Special Analysis, or something like that. Fälldin later looked at an organizational chart of Säpo and couldn’t find that department.”

The Zalachenko club, Blomkvist thought.

Modig seemed to be weighing her words.

“At risk of ending up shot,” she said at last, “there is one record that neither Fälldin nor his visitors thought of.”

“What was that?”

“Fälldin’s visitors’ logbook at Rosenbad. Jerker requisitioned it. It’s a public document.”

“And?”

Modig hesitated once again. “The book states only that the Prime Minister met with the chief of Säpo along with a colleague to discuss general questions.”

“Was there a name?”

“Yes. E. Gullberg.”

Blomkvist could feel the blood rush to his head.

“Evert Gullberg,” he said.

Blomkvist called from Café Madeleine on his anonymous mobile to book a flight to Amsterdam. The plane would take off from Arlanda at 2.50. He walked to Dressman on Kungsgatan and bought a shirt and a change of underwear, and then he went to a pharmacy to buy a toothbrush and other toiletries. He checked carefully to see that he was not being followed and hurried to catch the Arlanda Express.

The plane landed at Schiphol airport at 4.50, and by 6.30 he was checking into a small hotel about fifteen minutes’ walk from the Hague’s Centraal Station.

He spent two hours trying to locate the Swedish ambassador and made contact by telephone at around 9.00. He used all his powers of persuasion and explained that he was there on a matter of great urgency. The ambassador finally relented and agreed to meet him at 10.00 on Sunday morning.

Then Blomkvist went out and had a light dinner at a restaurant near his hotel. He was asleep by 11.00.

Ambassador Janeryd was in no mood for small talk when he offered Blomkvist coffee at his residence on Lange Voorhout.

“Well… what is it that’s so urgent?”

“Alexander Zalachenko. The Russian defector who came to Sweden in 1976,” Blomkvist said, handing him the letter from Fälldin.

Janeryd looked surprised. He read the letter and laid it on the table beside him.

Blomkvist explained the background and why Fälldin had written to him.

“I… I can’t discuss this matter,” Janeryd said at last.

“I think you can.”

“No, I could only speak of it with the constitutional committee.”

“There’s a great probability that you will have to do just that. But this letter tells you to use your own good judgement.”

“Fälldin is an honest man.”

“I don’t doubt that. And I’m not looking to damage either you or Fälldin. Nor do I ask you to tell me a single military secret that Zalachenko may have revealed.”

“I don’t know any secrets. I didn’t even know that his name was Zalachenko. I only knew him by his cover name. He was known as Ruben. But it’s absurd that you should think I would discuss it with a journalist.”

“Let me give you one very good reason why you should,” Blomkvist said and sat up straight in his chair. “This whole story is going to be published very soon. And when that happens, the media will either tear you to pieces or describe you as an honest civil servant who made the best of an impossible situation. You were the one Fälldin assigned to be the go-between with those who were protecting Zalachenko. I already know that.”

Janeryd was silent for almost a minute.

“Listen, I never had any information, not the remotest idea of the background you’ve described. I was rather young… I didn’t know how I should deal with these people. I met them about twice a year during the time I worked for the government. I was told that Ruben… your Zalachenko, was alive and healthy, that he was co-operating, and that the information he provided was invaluable. I was never privy to the details. I had no ‘need to know’.”

Blomkvist waited.

“The defector had operated in other countries and knew nothing about Sweden, so he was never a major factor for security policy. I informed the Prime Minister on a couple of occasions, but there was never very much to report.”

“I see.”

“They always said that he was being handled in the customary way and that the information he provided was being processed through the appropriate channels. What could I say? If I asked what it meant, they smiled and said that it was outside my security clearance level. I felt like an idiot.”

“You never considered the fact that there might be something wrong with the arrangement?”

“No. There was nothing wrong with the arrangement. I took it for granted that Säpo knew what they were doing and had the appropriate routines and experience. But I can’t talk about this.”

Janeryd had by this time been talking about it for several minutes.

“O.K… but all this is beside the point. Only one thing is important right now.”

“What?”

“The names of the individuals you had your meetings with.”

Janeryd gave Blomkvist a puzzled look.

“The people who were looking after Zalachenko went far beyond their jurisdiction. They’ve committed serious criminal acts and they’ll be the object of a preliminary investigation. That’s why Fälldin sent me to see you. He doesn’t know who they are. You were the one who met them.”

Janeryd blinked and pressed his lips together.

“One was Evert Gullberg… he was the top man.”

Janeryd nodded.

“How many times did you meet him?”

“He was at every meeting except one. There were about ten meetings during the time Fälldin was Prime Minister.”

“Where did you meet?”

“In the lobby of some hotel. Usually the Sheraton. Once at the Amaranth on Kungsholmen and sometimes at the Continental pub.”

“And who else was at the meetings?”

“It was a long time ago… I don’t remember.”

“Try.”

“There was a… Clinton. Like the American president.”

“First name?”

“Fredrik. I saw him four or five times.”

“Others?”

“Hans von Rottinger. I knew him through my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“Yes, my mother knew the von Rottinger family. Hans von Rottinger was always a pleasant chap. Before he turned up out of the blue at a meeting with Gullberg, I had no idea that he worked for Säpo.”

“He didn’t,” Blomkvist said.

Janeryd turned pale.

“He worked for something called the Section for Special Analysis,” Blomkvist said. “What were you told about that group?”

“Nothing. I mean, just that they were the ones who took care of the defector.”

“Right. But isn’t it strange that they don’t appear anywhere in Säpo’s organizational chart?”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“It is, isn’t it? So how did they set up the meetings? Did they call you, or did you call them?”

“Neither. The time and place for each meeting was set at the preceding one.”

“What happened if you needed to get in contact with them? For instance, to change the time of a meeting or something like that?”

“I had a number to call.”

“What was the number?”

“I couldn’t possibly remember.”

“Who answered if you called the number?”

“I don’t know. I never used it.”

“Next question. Who did you hand everything over to?”

“How do you mean?”

“When Fälldin’s term came to an end. Who took your place?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you write a report?”

“No. Everything was classified. I couldn’t even take notes.”

“And you never briefed your successor?”

“No.”

“So what happened?”

“Well… Fälldin left office, and Ola Ullsten came in. I was told that we would have to wait until after the next election. Then Fälldin was re-elected and our meetings were resumed. Then came the election in 1985. The Social Democrats won, and I assume that Palme appointed somebody to take over from me. I transferred to the foreign ministry and became a diplomat. I was posted to Egypt, and then to India.”

Blomkvist went on asking questions for another few minutes, but he was sure that he already had everything Janeryd could tell him. Three names.

Fredrik Clinton.

Hans von Rottinger.

And Evert Gullberg – the man who had shot Zalachenko.

The Zalachenko club.

He thanked Janeryd for the meeting and walked the short distance along Lange Voorhout to Hotel des Indes, from where he took a taxi to Centraal. It was not until he was in the taxi that he reached into his jacket pocket and stopped the tape recorder.

Berger looked up and scanned the half-empty newsroom beyond the glass cage. Holm was off that day. She saw no-one who showed any interest in her, either openly or covertly. Nor did she have reason to think that anyone on the editorial staff wished her ill.

The email had arrived a minute before. The sender was editorial-@aftonbladet.com›. Why Aftonbladet? The address was another fake.

Today’s message contained no text. There was only a jpeg that she opened in Photoshop.

The image was pornographic: a naked woman with exceptionally large breasts, a dog collar around her neck. She was on all fours and being mounted from the rear.

The woman’s face had been replaced with Berger’s. It was not a skilled collage, but probably that was not the point. The picture was from her old byline at Millennium and could be downloaded off the Net.

At the bottom of the picture was one word, written with the spray function in Photoshop.

Whore.

This was the ninth anonymous message she had received containing the word “whore,” sent apparently by someone at a well-known media outlet in Sweden. She had a cyber-stalker on her hands.

The telephone tapping was a more difficult task than the computer monitoring. Trinity had no trouble locating the cable to Prosecutor Ekström’s home telephone. The problem was that Ekström seldom or never used it for work-related calls. Trinity did not even consider trying to bug Ekström’s work telephone at police H.Q. on Kungsholmen. That would have required extensive access to the Swedish cable network, which he did not have.

But Trinity and Bob the Dog devoted the best part of a week to identifying and separating out Ekström’s mobile from the background noise of about 200,000 other mobile telephones within a kilometre of police headquarters.

They used a technique called Random Frequency Tracking System. The technique was not uncommon. It had been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, and was built into an unknown number of satellites that performed pinpoint monitoring of capitals around the world as well as flashpoints of special interest.

The N.S.A. had enormous resources and used a vast network in order to capture a large number of mobile conversations in a certain region simultaneously. Each individual call was separated and processed digitally by computers programmed to react to certain words, such as terrorist or Kalashnikov. If such a word occurred, the computer automatically sent an alarm, which meant that some operator would go in manually and listen to the conversation to decide whether it was of interest or not.

It was a more complex problem to identify a specific mobile telephone. Each mobile has its own unique signature – a fingerprint – in the form of the telephone number. With exceptionally sensitive equipment the N.S.A. could focus on a specific area to separate out and monitor mobile calls. The technique was simple but not 100 per cent effective. Outgoing calls were particularly hard to identify. Incoming calls were simpler because they were preceded by the fingerprint that would enable the telephone in question to receive the signal.

The difference between Trinity and the N.S.A. attempting to eavesdrop could be measured in economic terms. The N.S.A. had an annual budget of several billion U.S. dollars, close to twelve thousand fulltime agents, and access to cutting-edge technology in I.T. and telecommunications. Trinity had a van with thirty kilos of electronic equipment, much of which was home-made stuff that Bob the Dog had set up. Through its global satellite monitoring the N.S.A. could home in highly sensitive antennae on a specific building anywhere in the world. Trinity had an antenna constructed by Bob the Dog which had an effective range of about five hundred metres.

The relatively limited technology to which Trinity had access meant that he had to park his van on Bergsgatan or one of the nearby streets and laboriously calibrate the equipment until he had identified the fingerprint that represented Ekström’s mobile number. Since he did not know Swedish, he had to relay the conversations via another mobile back home to Plague, who did the actual eavesdropping.

For five days Plague, who was looking more and more hollow-eyed, listened in vain to a vast number of calls to and from police headquarters and the surrounding buildings. He had heard fragments of ongoing investigations, uncovered planned lovers’ trysts, and taped hours and hours of conversations of no interest whatsoever. Late on the evening of the fifth day, Trinity sent a signal which a digital display instantly identified as Ekström’s mobile number. Plague locked the parabolic antenna on to the exact frequency.

The technology of R.F.T.S. worked primarily on incoming calls to Ekström. Trinity’s parabolic antenna captured the search for Ekström’s mobile number as it was sent through the ether.

Because Trinity could record the calls from Ekström, he also got voiceprints that Plague could process.

Plague ran Ekström’s digitized voice through a program called V.P.R.S., Voiceprint Recognition System. He specified a dozen commonly occurring words, such as “O.K.” or “Salander”. When he had five separate examples of a word, he charted it with respect to the time it took to speak the word, what tone of voice and frequency range it had, whether the end of the word went up or down, and a dozen other markers. The result was a graph. In this way Plague could also monitor outgoing calls from Ekström. His parabolic antenna would be permanently listening out for a call containing Ekström’s characteristic graph curve for one of a dozen commonly occurring words. The technology was not perfect, but roughly half of all the calls that Ekström made on his mobile from anywhere near police headquarters were monitored and recorded.

The system had an obvious weakness. As soon as Ekström left police headquarters, it was no longer possible to monitor his mobile, unless Trinity knew where he was and could park his van in the immediate vicinity.

With the authorization from the highest level, Edklinth had been able to set up a legitimate operations department. He picked four colleagues, purposely selecting younger talent who had experience on the regular police force and were only recently recruited to S.I.S. Two had a background in the Fraud Division, one had been with the financial police, and one was from the Violent Crimes Division. They were summoned to Edklinth’s office and told of their assignment as well as the need for absolute secrecy. He made plain that the investigation was being carried out at the express order of the Prime Minister. Inspector Figuerola was named as their chief, and she directed the investigation with a force that matched her physical appearance.

But the investigation proceeded slowly. This was largely due to the fact that no-one was quite sure who or what should be investigated. On more than one occasion Edklinth and Figuerola considered bringing Mårtensson in for questioning. But they decided to wait. Arresting him would reveal the existence of the investigation.

Finally, on Tuesday, eleven days after the meeting with the Prime Minister, Figuerola came to Edklinth’s office.

“I think we’ve got something.”

“Sit down.”

“Evert Gullberg. One of our investigators had a talk with Marcus Erlander, who’s leading the investigation into Zalachenko’s murder. According to Erlander, S.I.S. contacted the Göteborg police just two hours after the murder and gave them information about Gullberg’s threatening letters.”

“That was fast.”

“A little too fast. S.I.S. faxed nine letters that Gullberg had supposedly written. There’s just one problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Two of the letters were sent to the justice department – to the Minister of Justice and to the Deputy Minister.”

“I know that.”

“Yes, but the letter to the Deputy Minister wasn’t logged in at the department until the following day. It arrived with a later delivery.”

Edklinth stared at Figuerola. He felt very much afraid that his suspicions were going to turn out to be justified. Figuerola went implacably on.

“So we have S.I.S. sending a fax of a threatening letter that hadn’t yet reached its addressee.”

“Good Lord,” Edklinth said.

“It was someone in Personal Protection who faxed them through.”

“Who?”

“I don’t think he’s involved in the case. The letters landed on his desk in the morning, and shortly after the murder he was told to get in touch with the Göteborg police.”

“Who gave him the instruction?”

“The chief of Secretariat’s assistant.”

“Good God, Monica. Do you know what this means? It means that S.I.S. was involved in Zalachenko’s murder.”

“Not necessarily. But it definitely does mean that some individuals within S.I.S. had knowledge of the murder before it was committed. The only question is: who?”

“The chief of Secretariat…”

“Yes. But I’m beginning to suspect that this Zalachenko club is out of house.”

“How do you mean?”

“Mårtensson. He was moved from Personal Protection and is working on his own. We’ve had him under surveillance round the clock for the past week. He hasn’t had contact with anyone within S.I.S. as far as we can tell. He gets calls on a mobile that we cannot monitor. We don’t know what number it is, but it’s not his normal mobile number. He did meet with the fair-haired man, but we haven’t been able to identify him.”

Edklinth frowned. At the same instant Anders Berglund knocked on the door. He was one of the new team, the officer who had worked with the financial police.

“I think I’ve found Evert Gullberg,” Berglund said.

“Come in,” Edklinth said.

Berglund put a dog-eared, black-and-white photograph on the desk. Edklinth and Figuerola looked at the picture, which showed a man that both of them immediately recognized. He was being led through a doorway by two broad-shouldered plain-clothes police officers. The legendary double agent Colonel Stig Wennerström.[7]

“This print comes from Åhlens&Åkerlunds Publishers and was used in Se magazine in the spring of 1964. The photograph was taken in the course of the trial. Behind Wennerström you can see three people. On the right, Detective Superintendent Otto Danielsson, the policeman who arrested him.”

“Yes…”

“Look at the man on the left behind Danielsson.”

They saw a tall man with a narrow moustache who was wearing a hat. He reminded Edklinth vaguely of the writer Dashiell Hammett.

“Compare his face with this passport photograph of Gullberg, taken when he was sixty-six.”

Edklinth frowned. “I wouldn’t be able to swear it’s the same person –”

“But it is,” Berglund said. “Turn the print over.”

On the reverse was a stamp saying that the picture belonged to Åhlens&Åkerlunds Publishers and that the photographer’s name was Julius Estholm. The text was written in pencil. Stig Wennerström flanked by two police officers on his way into Stockholm district court. In the background O. Danielsson, E. Gullberg and H.W. Francke.

“Evert Gullberg,” Figuerola said. “He was S.I.S.”

“No,” Berglund said. “Technically speaking, he wasn’t. At least not when this picture was taken.”

“Oh?”

“S.I.S. wasn’t established until four months later. In this photograph he was still with the Secret State Police.”

“Who’s H.W. Francke?” Figuerola said.

“Hans Wilhelm Francke,” Edklinth said. “Died in the early ’90s, but was assistant chief of the Secret State Police in the late ’50s and early ’60s. He was a bit of a legend, just like Otto Danielsson. I actually met him a couple of times.”

“Is that so?” Figuerola said.

“He left S.I.S. in the late ’60s. Francke and P.G. Vinge never saw eye to eye, and he was more or less forced to resign at the age of fifty or fifty-five. Then he opened his own shop.”

“His own shop?”

“He became a consultant in security for industry. He had an office on Stureplan, but he also gave lectures from time to time at S.I.S. training sessions. That’s where I met him.”

“What did Vinge and Francke quarrel about?”

“They were just very different. Francke was a bit of a cowboy who saw K.G.B. agents everywhere, and Vinge was a bureaucrat of the old school. Vinge was fired shortly thereafter. A bit ironic, that, because he thought Palme was working for the K.G.B.”

Figuerola looked at the photograph of Gullberg and Francke standing side by side.

“I think it’s time we had another talk with Justice,” Edklinth told her.

“Millennium came out today,” Figuerola said.

Edklinth shot her a glance.

“Not a word about the Zalachenko affair,” she said.

“So we’ve got a month before the next issue. Good to know. But we have to deal with Blomkvist. In the midst of all this mess he’s like a hand grenade with the pin pulled.”

CHAPTER 17

Blomkvist had no warning that someone was in the stairwell when he reached the landing outside his top-floor apartment at Bellmansgatan 1. It was 7.00 in the evening. He stopped short when he saw a woman with short, blonde curly hair sitting on the top step. He recognized her straightaway as Monica Figuerola of S.I.S. from the passport photograph Karim had located.

“Hello, Blomkvist,” she said cheerfully, closing the book she had been reading. Blomkvist looked at the book and saw that it was in English, on the idea of God in the ancient world. He studied his unexpected visitor as she stood up. She was wearing a short-sleeved summer dress and had laid a brick-red leather jacket over the top stair.

“We need to talk to you,” she said.

She was tall, taller than he was, and that impression was magnified by the fact that she was standing two steps above him. He looked at her arms and then at her legs and saw that she was much more muscular than he was.

“You spend a couple of hours a week at the gym,” he said.

She smiled and took out her I.D.

“My name is –”

“Monica Figuerola, born in 1969, living on Pontonjärgatan on Kungsholmen. You came from Borlänge and you’ve worked with the Uppsala police. For three years you’ve been working in S.I.S., Constitutional Protection. You’re an exercise fanatic and you were once a top-class athlete, almost made it on to the Swedish Olympic team. What do you want with me?”

She was surprised, but she quickly regained her composure.

“Fair enough,” she said in a low voice. “You know who I am – so you don’t have to be afraid of me.”

“I don’t?”

“There are some people who need to have a talk with you in peace and quiet. Since your apartment and mobile seem to be bugged and we have reason to be discreet, I’ve been sent to invite you.”

“And why would I go anywhere with somebody who works for Säpo?”

She thought for a moment. “Well… you could just accept a friendly personal invitation, or if you prefer, I could handcuff you and take you with me.” She smiled sweetly. “Look, Blomkvist. I understand that you don’t have many reasons to trust anyone who comes from S.I.S. But it’s like this: not everyone who works there is your enemy, and my superiors really want to talk to you. So, which do you prefer? Handcuffed or voluntary?”

“I’ve been handcuffed by the police once already this year. And that was enough. Where are we going?”

She had parked around the corner down on Pryssgränd. When they were settled in her new Saab 9–5, she flipped open her mobile and pressed a speed-dial number.

“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

She told Blomkvist to fasten his seat belt and drove over Slussen to Östermalm and parked on a side street off Artillerigatan. She sat still for a moment and looked at him.

“This is a friendly invitation, Blomkvist. You’re not risking anything.”

Blomkvist said nothing. He was reserving judgement until he knew what this was all about. She punched in the code on the street door. They took the lift to the fifth floor, to an apartment with the name Martinsson on the door.

“We’ve borrowed the place for tonight’s meeting,” she said, opening the door. “To your right, into the living room.”

The first person Blomkvist saw was Torsten Edklinth, which was no surprise since Säpo was deeply involved in what had happened, and Edklinth was Figuerola’s boss. The fact that the Director of Constitutional Protection had gone to the trouble of bringing him in said that somebody was nervous.

Then he saw a figure by the window. The Minister of Justice. That was a surprise.

Then he heard a sound to his right and saw the Prime Minister get up from an armchair. This he had not for a moment expected.

“Good evening, Herr Blomkvist,” the P.M. said. “Excuse us for summoning you to this meeting at such short notice, but we’ve discussed the situation and agreed that we need to talk to you. May I offer you some coffee, or something else to drink?”

Blomkvist looked around. He saw a dining-room table of dark wood that was cluttered with glasses, coffee cups and the remnants of sandwiches. They must have been there for a couple of hours already.

“Ramlösa,” he said.

Figuerola poured him a mineral water. They sat down on the sofas as she stayed in the background.

“He recognized me and knew my name, where I live, where I work, and the fact that I’m a workout fanatic,” Figuerola said to no-one in particular.

The Prime Minister glanced quickly at Edklinth and then at Blomkvist. Blomkvist realized at once that he was in a position of some strength. The Prime Minister needed something from him and presumably had no idea how much Blomkvist knew or did not know.

“How did you know who Inspector Figuerola was?” Edklinth said.

Blomkvist looked at the Director of Constitutional Protection. He could not be sure why the Prime Minister had set up a meeting with him in a borrowed apartment in Östermalm, but he suddenly felt inspired. There were not many ways it could have come about. It was Armansky who had set this in train by giving information to someone he trusted. Which must have been Edklinth, or someone close to him. Blomkvist took a chance.

“A mutual friend spoke with you,” he said to Edklinth. “You sent Figuerola to find out what was going on, and she discovered that some Säpo activists are running illegal telephone taps and breaking into my apartment and stealing things. This means that you have confirmed the existence of what I call the Zalachenko club. It made you so nervous that you knew you had to take the matter further, but you sat in your office for a while and didn’t know in which direction to go. So you went to the justice minister, and he in turn went to the Prime Minister. And now here we all are. What is it that you want from me?”

Blomkvist spoke with a confidence that suggested that he had a source right at the heart of the affair and had followed every step Edklinth had taken. He knew that his guesswork was on the mark when Edklinth’s eyes widened.

“The Zalachenko club spies on me, I spy on them,” Blomkvist went on. “And you spy on the Zalachenko club. This situation makes the Prime Minister both angry and uneasy. He knows that at the end of this conversation a scandal awaits that the government might not survive.”

Figuerola understood that Blomkvist was bluffing, and she knew how he had been able to surprise her by knowing her name and shoe size.

He saw me in my car on Bellmansgatan. He took the registration number and looked me up. But the rest is guesswork.

She did not say a word.

The Prime Minister certainly looked uneasy now.

“Is that what awaits us?” he said. “A scandal to bring down the government?”

“The survival of the government isn’t my concern,” Blomkvist said. “My role is to expose shit like the Zalachenko club.”

The Prime Minister said: “And my job is to run the country in accordance with the constitution.”

“Which means that my problem is definitely the government’s problem. But not vice versa.”

“Could we stop going round in circles? Why do you think I arranged this meeting?”

“To find out what I know and what I intend to do with it.”

“Partly right. But more precisely, we’ve landed in a constitutional crisis. Let me first say that the government has absolutely no hand in this matter. We have been caught napping, without a doubt. I’ve never heard mention of this… what you call the Zalachenko club. The minister here has never heard a word about this matter either. Torsten Edklinth, an official high up in S.I.S. who has worked in Säpo for many years, has never heard of it.”

“It’s still not my problem.”

“I appreciate that. What I’d like to know is when you mean to publish your article, and exactly what it is you intend to publish. And this has nothing to do with damage control.”

“Does it not?”

“Herr Blomkvist, the worst possible thing I could do in this situation would be to try to influence the shape or content of your story. Instead, I am going to propose a co-operation.”

“Please explain.”

“Since we have now had confirmation that a conspiracy exists within an exceptionally sensitive part of the administration, I have ordered an investigation.” The P.M. turned to the Minister of Justice. “Please explain what the government has directed.”

“It’s very simple,” said the Minister of Justice. “Torsten Edklinth has been given the task of finding out whether we can confirm this. He is to gather information that can be turned over to the Prosecutor General, who in turn must decide whether charges should be brought. It is a very clear instruction. And this evening Edklinth has been reporting on how the investigation is proceeding. We’ve had a long discussion about the constitutional implications – obviously we want it to be handled properly.”

“Naturally,” Blomkvist said in a tone that indicated he had scant trust in the Prime Minister’s assurances.

“The investigation has already reached a sensitive stage. We have not yet identified exactly who is involved. That will take time. And that’s why we sent Inspector Figuerola to invite you to this meeting.”

“It wasn’t exactly an invitation.”

The Prime Minister frowned and glanced at Figuerola.

“It’s not important,” Blomkvist said. “Her behaviour was exemplary. Please come to the point.”

“We want to know your publication date. This investigation is being conducted in great secrecy. If you publish before Edklinth has completed it, it could be ruined.”

“And when would you like me to publish? After the next election, I suppose?”

“You decide that for yourself. It’s not something I can influence. Just tell us, so that we know exactly what our deadline is.”

“I see. You spoke about co-operation…”

The P.M. said: “Yes, but first let me say that under normal circumstances I would not have dreamed of asking a journalist to come to such a meeting.”

“Presumably in normal circumstances you would be doing everything you could to keep journalists away from a meeting like this.”

“Quite so. But I’ve understood that you’re driven by several factors. You have a reputation for not pulling your punches when there’s corruption involved. In this case there are no differences of opinion to divide us.”

“Aren’t there?”

“No, not in the least. Or rather… the differences that exist might be of a legal nature, but we share an objective. If this Zalachenko club exists, it is not merely a criminal conspiracy – it is a threat to national security. These activities must be stopped, and those responsible must be held accountable. On that point we would be in agreement, correct?”

Blomkvist nodded.

“I’ve understood that you know more about this story than anyone else. We suggest that you share your knowledge. If this were a regular police investigation of an ordinary crime, the leader of the preliminary investigation could decide to summon you for an interview. But, as you can appreciate, this is an extreme state of affairs.”

Blomkvist weighed the situation for a moment.

“And what do I get in return – if I do co-operate?”

“Nothing. I’m not going to haggle with you. If you want to publish tomorrow morning, then do so. I won’t get involved in any horse-trading that might be constitutionally dubious. I’m asking you to cooperate in the interests of the country.”

“In this case ‘nothing’ could be quite a lot,” Blomkvist said. “For one thing… I’m very, very angry. I’m furious at the state and the government and Säpo and all these fucking bastards who for no reason at all locked up a twelve-year-old girl in a mental hospital until she could be declared incompetent.”

“Lisbeth Salander has become a government matter,” the P.M. said, and smiled. “Mikael, I am personally very upset over what happened to her. Please believe me when I say that those responsible will be called to account. But before we can do that, we have to know who they are.”

“My priority is that Salander should be acquitted and declared competent.”

“I can’t help you with that. I’m not above the law, and I can’t direct what prosecutors and the courts decide. She has to be acquitted by a court.”

“O.K.,” Blomkvist said. “You want my co-operation. Then give me some insight into Edklinth’s investigation, and I’ll tell you when and what I plan to publish.”

“I can’t give you that insight. That would be placing myself in the same relation to you as the Minister of Justice’s predecessor once stood to the journalist Ebbe Carlsson.[8]”

“I’m not Ebbe Carlsson,” Blomkvist said calmly.

“I know that. On the other hand, Edklinth can decide for himself what he can share with you within the framework of his assignment.”

“Hmm,” Blomkvist said. “I want to know who Evert Gullberg was.”

Silence fell over the group.

“Gullberg was presumably for many years the chief of that division within S.I.S. which you call the Zalachenko club,” Edklinth said.

The Prime Minister gave him a sharp look.

“I think he knows that already,” Edklinth said by way of apology.

“That’s correct,” Blomkvist said. “He started at Säpo in the ’50s. In the ’60s he became chief of some outfit called the Section for Special Analysis. He was the one in charge of the Zalachenko affair.”

The P.M. shook his head. “You know more than you ought to. I would very much like to discover how you came by all this information. But I’m not going to ask.”

“There are holes in my story,” Blomkvist said. “I need to fill them. Give me information and I won’t try to compromise you.”

“As Prime Minister I’m not in a position to deliver any such information. And Edklinth is on a very thin ice if he does so.”

“Don’t pull the wool over my eyes. I know what you want and you know what I want. If you give me information, then you’ll be my sources – with all the enduring anonymity that implies. Don’t misunderstand me… I’ll tell the truth as I see it in what I publish. If you are involved, I will expose you and do everything I can to ensure that you are never re-elected. But as yet I have no reason to believe that is the case.”

The Prime Minister glanced at Edklinth. After a moment he nodded. Blomkvist took it as a sign that the Prime Minister had just broken the law – if only of the more academic specie – by giving his consent to the sharing of classified information with a journalist.

“This can all be solved quite simply,” Edklinth said. “I have my own investigative team and I decide for myself which colleagues to recruit for the investigation. You can’t be employed by the investigation because that would mean you would be obliged to sign an oath of confidentiality. But I can hire you as an external consultant.”

Berger’s life had been filled with meetings and work around the clock the minute she had stepped into Morander’s shoes.

It was not until Wednesday night, almost two weeks after Blomkvist had given her Cortez’s research papers on Borgsjö, that she had time to address the issue. As she opened the folder she realized that her procrastination had also to do with the fact that she did not really want to face up to the problem. She already knew that however she dealt with it, calamity would be inevitable.

She arrived home in Saltsjöbaden at 7.00, unusually early, and it was only when she had to turn off the alarm in the hall that she remembered her husband was not at home. She had given him an especially long kiss that morning because he was flying to Paris to deliver some lectures and would not be back until the weekend. She had no idea where he was giving the lectures, or what they were about.

She went upstairs, ran the bath, and undressed. She took Cortez’s folder with her and spent the next half hour reading through the whole story. She could not help but smile. The boy was going to be a formidable reporter. He was twenty-six years old and had been at Millennium for four years, right out of journalism school. She felt a certain pride. The story had Millennium’s stamp on it from beginning to end, every t was crossed, every i dotted.

But she also felt tremendously depressed. Borgsjö was a good man, and she liked him. He was soft-spoken, sharp-witted and charming, and he seemed unconcerned with prestige. Besides, he was her employer. How in God’s name could he have been so bloody stupid?

She wondered whether there might be an alternative explanation or some mitigating circumstances, but she already knew it would be impossible to explain this away.

She put the folder on the windowsill and stretched out in the bath to ponder the situation.

Millennium was going to publish the story, no question. If she had still been there, she would not have hesitated. That Millennium had leaked the story to her in advance was nothing but a courtesy – they wanted to reduce the damage to her personally. If the situation had been reversed – if S.M.P. had made some damaging discovery about Millennium’s chairman of the board (who happened to be herself) – they would not have hesitated either.

Publication would be a serious blow to Borgsjö. The damaging thing was not that his company, Vitavara Inc., had imported goods from a company on the United Nations blacklist of companies using child labour – and in this case slave labour too, in the form of convicts, and undoubtedly some of these convicts were political prisoners. The really damaging thing was that Borgsjö knew about all this and still went on ordering toilets from Fong Soo Industries. It was a mark of the sort of greed that did not go down well with the Swedish people in the wake of the revelations about other criminal capitalists such as Skandia’s former president.

Borgsjö would naturally claim that he did not know about the conditions at Fong Soo, but Cortez had solid evidence. If Borgsjö took that tack he would be exposed as a liar. In June 1997 Borgsjö had gone to Vietnam to sign the first contracts. He had spent ten days there on that occasion and been round the company’s factories. If he claimed not to have known that many of the workers there were only twelve or thirteen years old, he would look like an idiot.

Cortez had demonstrated that in 1999, the U.N. commission on child labour had added Fong Soo Industries to its list of companies that exploit child labour, and that this had then been the subject of magazine articles. Two organizations against child labour, one of them the globally recognized International Joint Effort Against Child Labour in London, had written letters to companies that had placed orders with Fong Soo. Seven letters had been sent to Vitavara Inc., and two of those were addressed to Borgsjö personally. The organization in London had been very willing to supply the evidence. And Vitavara Inc. had not replied to any of the letters.

Worse still, Borgsjö went to Vietnam twice more, in 2001 and 2004, to renew the contracts. This was the coup de grâce. It would be impossible for Borgsjö to claim ignorance.

The inevitable media storm could lead only to one thing. If Borgsjö was smart, he would apologize and resign from his positions on various boards. If he decided to fight, he would be steadily annihilated.

Berger did not care if Borgsjö was or was not chairman of the board of Vitavara Inc. What mattered to her was that he was the board chairman of S.M.P. At a time when the newspaper was on the edge and a campaign of rejuvenation was under way, S.M.P. could not afford to keep him as chairman.

Berger’s decision was made.

She would go to Borgsjö, show him the document, and thereby hope to persuade him to resign before the story was published.

If he dug in his heels, she would call an emergency board meeting, explain the situation, and force the board to dismiss Borgsjö. And if they did not, she would have to resign, effective immediately.

She had been thinking for so long that the bathwater was now cold. She showered and towelled herself and went to the bedroom to put on a dressing gown. Then she picked up her mobile and called Blomkvist. No answer. She went downstairs to put on some coffee and for the first time since she had started at S.M.P., she looked to see whether there was a film on T.V. that she could watch to relax.

As she walked into the living room, she felt a sharp pain in her foot. She looked down and saw blood. She took another step and pain shot through her entire foot, and she had to hop over to an antique chair to sit down. She lifted her foot and saw to her dismay that a shard of glass had pierced her heel. At first she felt faint. Then she steeled herself and took hold of the shard and pulled it out. The pain was appalling, and blood gushed from the wound.

She pulled open a drawer in the hall where she kept scarves, gloves and hats. She found a scarf and wrapped it around her foot and tied it tight. That was not going to be enough, so she reinforced it with another improvised bandage. The bleeding had apparently subsided.

She looked at the bloodied piece of glass in amazement. How did this get here? Then she discovered more glass on the hall floor. Jesus Christ… She looked into the living room and saw that the picture window was shattered and the floor was covered in shattered glass.

She went back to the front door and put on the outdoor shoes she had kicked off as she came home. That is, she put on one shoe and stuck the toes of her injured foot into the other, and hopped into the living room to take stock of the damage.

Then she found the brick in the middle of the living-room floor.

She limped over to the balcony door and went out to the garden. Someone had sprayed in metre-high letters on the back wall:

It was just after 9.00 in the evening when Figuerola held the car door open for Blomkvist. She went around the car and got into the driver’s seat.

“Should I drive you home or do you want to be dropped off somewhere?”

Blomkvist stared straight ahead. “I haven’t got my bearings yet, to be honest. I’ve never had a confrontation with a prime minister before.”

Figuerola laughed. “You played your cards very well,” she said. “I would never have guessed you were such a good poker player.”

“I meant every word.”

“Of course, but what I meant was that you pretended to know a lot more than you actually do. I realized that when I worked out how you identified me.”

Blomkvist turned and looked at her profile.

“You wrote down my car registration when I was parked on the hill outside your building. You made it sound as if you knew what was being discussed at the Prime Minister’s secretariat.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Blomkvist said.

She gave him a quick look and turned on to Grev Turegatan. “The rules of the game. I shouldn’t have picked that spot, but there wasn’t anywhere else to park. You keep a sharp eye on your surroundings, don’t you?”

“You were sitting with a map spread out on the front seat, talking on the telephone. I took down your registration and ran a routine check. I check out every car that catches my attention. I usually draw a blank. In your case I discovered that you worked for Säpo.”

“I was following Mårtensson.”

“Aha. So simple.”

“Then I discovered that you were tailing him using Susanne Linder at Milton Security.”

“Armansky’s detailed her to keep an eye on what goes on around my apartment.”

“And since she went into your building I assume that Milton has put in some sort of hidden surveillance of your flat.”

“That’s right. We have an excellent film of how they break in and go through my papers. Mårtensson carries a portable photocopier with him. Have you identified Mårtensson’s sidekick?”

“He’s unimportant. A locksmith with a criminal record who’s probably being paid to open your door.”

“Name?”

“Protected source?”

“Naturally.”

“Lars Faulsson. Forty-seven. Alias Falun. Convicted of safe-cracking in the ’80s and some other minor stuff. Has a shop at Norrtull.”

“Thanks.”

“But let’s save the secrets till we meet again tomorrow.”

The meeting had ended with an agreement that Blomkvist would come to Constitutional Protection the next day to set in train an exchange of information. Blomkvist was thinking. They were just passing Sergels Torg in the city centre.

“You know what? I’m incredibly hungry. I had a late lunch and was going to make a pasta when I got home, but I was waylaid by you. Have you eaten?”

“A while ago.”

“Take us to a restaurant where we can get some decent food.”

“All food is decent.”

He looked at her. “I thought you were a health-food fanatic.”

“No, I’m a workout fanatic. If you work out you can eat whatever you want. Within reason.”

She braked at the Klaraberg viaduct and considered the options. Instead of turning down towards Södermalm she kept going straight to Kungsholmen.

“I don’t know what the restaurants are like in Söder, but I know an excellent Bosnian place at Fridhemsplan. Their burek is fantastic.”

“Sounds good,” Blomkvist said.

Salander tapped her way, letter by letter, through her report. She had worked an average of five hours each day. She was careful to express herself precisely. She left out all the details that could be used against her.

That she was locked up had turned out to be a blessing. She always had plenty of warning to put away her Palm when she heard the rattling of a key ring or a key being put in the lock.

There was no reason to volunteer the information that Lundin had called her a whore or that she had bent down and picked up Nieminen’s P-83 Wanad and punished Lundin by shooting him in the foot. The police could probably work that out for themselves, but it was up to them to prove it. She did not mean to make their job any easier by confessing to something that would lead to a prison sentence.

The text had grown to thirty-three pages and she was nearing the end. In some sections she was particularly reticent about details and went to a lot of trouble not to supply any evidence that could back up in any way the many claims she was making. She went so far as to obscure some obvious evidence and instead moved on to the next link in the chain of events.

She scrolled back and read through the text of a section where she told how Advokat Bjurman had violently and sadistically raped her. That was the part she had spent the most time on, and one of the few she had rewritten several times before she was satisfied. The section took up nineteen lines in her account. She reported in a matter-of-fact manner how he had hit her, thrown her on to her stomach on the bed, taped her mouth and handcuffed her. She then related how he had repeatedly committed acts of sexual violence against her, including anal penetration. She went on to report how at one point during the rape he had wound a piece of clothing – her own T-shirt – around her neck and strangled her for such a long time that she temporarily lost consciousness. Then there were several lines of text where she identified the implements he had used during the rape, which included a short whip, an anal plug, a rough dildo, and clamps which he attached to her nipples.

She frowned and studied the text. At last she raised the stylus and tapped out a few more lines of text.

The matter-of-fact tone gave the text such a surreal touch that it sounded like an absurd fantasy.

The story simply did not sound credible.

That was her intention.

At that moment she heard the rattle of the guard’s key ring. She turned off the Palm at once and put it in the recess in the back of the bedside table. It was Giannini. She frowned. It was 9.00 in the evening and Giannini did not usually appear this late.

“Hello, Lisbeth.”

“Hello.”

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m not finished yet.”

Giannini sighed. “Lisbeth, they’ve set the trial date for July 13.”

“That’s O.K.”

“No, it’s not O.K. Time is running out, and you’re not telling me anything. I’m beginning to think that I made a colossal mistake taking on the job. If we’re going to have the slightest chance, you have to trust me. We have to work together.”

Salander studied her for a long moment. Finally she leaned her head back and looked up at the ceiling.

“I know what we’re supposed to be doing. I understand Mikael’s plan. And he’s right.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“But I am.”

“The police want to interrogate you again. A detective named Hans Faste from Stockholm.”

“Let him interrogate me. I won’t say a word.”

“You have to hand in a statement.”

Salander gave Giannini a sharp look. “I repeat: we won’t say a word to the police. When we get to that courtroom the prosecutor won’t have a single syllable from any interrogation to fall back on. All they’ll have is the statement that I’m composing now, and large parts of it will seem preposterous. And they’re going to get it a few days before the trial.”

“So when are you actually going to sit down with a pen and paper and write this statement?”

“You’ll have it in a few days. But it can’t go to the prosecutor until just before the trial.”

Giannini looked sceptical. Salander suddenly gave her a cautious smile. “You talk about trust. Can I trust you?”

“Of course you can.”

“O.K., could you smuggle me in a hand-held computer so that I can keep in touch with people online?”

“No, of course not. If it were discovered I’d be charged with a crime and lose my licence to practise.”

“But if someone else got one in… would you report it to the police?”

Giannini raised her eyebrows. “If I didn’t know about it…”

“But if you did know about it, what would you do?”

“I’d shut my eyes. How about that?”

“This hypothetical computer is soon going to send you a hypothetical email. When you’ve read it I want you to come again.”

“Lisbeth –”

“Wait. It’s like this. The prosecutor is dealing with a marked deck. I’m at a disadvantage no matter what I do, and the purpose of the trial is to get me committed to a secure psychiatric ward.”

“I know.”

“If I’m going to survive, I have to fight dirty.”

Finally Giannini nodded.

“When you came to see me the first time,” Salander said, “you had a message from Blomkvist. He said that he’d told you almost everything, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions had to do with the skills he discovered I had when we were in Hedestad.”

“That’s correct.”

“He was referring to the fact that I’m extremely good with computers. So good that I can read and copy what’s on Ekström’s machine.”

Giannini went pale.

“You can’t be involved in this. And you can’t use any of that material at the trial,” Salander said.

“Hardly. You’re right about that.”

“So you know nothing about it.”

“O.K.”

“But someone else – your brother, let’s say – could publish selected excerpts from it. You’ll have to think about this possibility when you plan your strategy.”

“I understand.”

“Annika, this trial is going to turn on who uses the toughest methods.”

“I know.”

“I’m happy to have you as my lawyer. I trust you and I need your help.”

“Hmm.”

“But if you get difficult about the fact that I’m going to use unethical methods, then we’ll lose the trial.”

“Right.”

“And if that were the case, I need to know now. I’d have to get myself a new lawyer.”

“Lisbeth, I can’t break the law.”

“You don’t have to break any law. But you do have to shut your eyes to the fact that I am. Can you manage that?”

Salander waited patiently for almost a minute before Annika nodded.

“Good. Let me tell you the main points that I’m going to put in my statement.”

Figuerola had been right. The burek was fantastic. Blomkvist studied her carefully as she came back from the ladies’. She moved as gracefully as a ballerina, but she had a body like… hmm. Blomkvist could not help being fascinated. He repressed an impulse to reach out and feel her leg muscles.

“How long have you been working out?” he said.

“Since I was a teenager.”

“And how many hours a week do you do it?”

“Two hours a day. Sometimes three.”

“Why? I mean, I understand why people work out, but…”

“You think it’s excessive.”

“I’m not sure exactly what I think.”

She smiled and did not seem at all irritated by his questions.

“Maybe you’re just bothered by seeing a girl with muscles. Do you think it’s a turn-off, or unfeminine?”

“No, not at all. It suits you somehow. You’re very sexy.”

She laughed.

“I’m cutting back on the training now. Ten years ago I was doing rock-hard bodybuilding. It was cool. But now I have to be careful that the muscles don’t turn to fat. I don’t want to get flabby. So I lift weights once a week and spend the rest of the time doing some cross-training, or running, playing badminton, or swimming, that sort of thing. It’s exercise more than hard training.”

“I see.”

“The reason I work out is that it feels great. That’s a normal phenomenon among people who do extreme training. The body produces a pain-suppressing chemical and you become addicted to it. If you don’t run every day, you get withdrawal symptoms after a while. You feel an enormous sense of wellbeing when you give something your all. It’s almost as powerful as good sex.”

Blomkvist laughed.

“You should start working out yourself,” she said. “You’re getting a little thick in the waist.”

“I know,” he said. “A constant guilty conscience. Sometimes I start running regularly and lose a couple of kilos. Then I get involved in something and don’t get time to do it again for a month or two.”

“You’ve been pretty busy these last few months. I’ve been reading a lot about you. You beat the police by several lengths when you tracked down Zalachenko and identified Niedermann.”

“Lisbeth Salander was faster.”

“How did you find out Niedermann was in Gosseberga?”

Blomkvist shrugged. “Routine research. I wasn’t the one who found him. It was our assistant editor, well, now our editor-in-chief Malin Eriksson who managed to dig him up through the corporate records. He was on the board of Zalachenko’s company, K.A.B Import.”

“That simple…”

“And why did you become a Säpo activist?” he said.

“Believe it or not, I’m something as old-fashioned as a democrat. I mean, the police are necessary, and a democracy needs a political safeguard. That’s why I’m proud to be working at Constitutional Protection.”

“Is it really something to be proud of?” said Blomkvist.

“You don’t like the Security Police.”

“I don’t like institutions that are beyond normal parliamentary scrutiny. It’s an invitation to abuse of power, no matter how noble the intentions. Why are you so interested in the religion of antiquity?”

Figuerola looked at Blomkvist.

“You were reading a book about it on my staircase,” he said.

“The subject fascinates me.”

“I see.”

“I’m interested in a lot of things. I’ve studied law and political science while I’ve worked for the police. Before that I studied both philosophy and the history of ideas.”

“Do you have any weaknesses?”

“I don’t read fiction, I never go to the cinema, and I watch only the news on T.V. How about you? Why did you become a journalist?”

“Because there are institutions like Säpo that lack parliamentary oversight and which have to be exposed from time to time. I don’t really know. I suppose my answer to that is the same one you gave me: I believe in a constitutional democracy and sometimes it has to be protected.”

“The way you did with Hans-Erik Wennerström?”

“Something like that.”

“You’re not married. Are you and Erika Berger together?”

“Erika Berger’s married.”

“So all the rumours about you two are nonsense. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“No-one steady.”

“So the rumours might be true after all.”

Blomkvist smiled.

Eriksson worked at her kitchen table at home in Årsta until the small hours. She sat bent over spreadsheets of Millennium’s budget and was so engrossed that Anton, her boyfriend, eventually gave up trying to have a conversation with her. He washed the dishes, made a late snack, and put on some coffee. Then he left her in peace and sat down to watch a repeat of C.S.I.

Malin had never before had to cope with anything more complex than a household budget, but she had worked alongside Berger balancing the monthly books, and she understood the principles. Now she was suddenly editor-in-chief, and with that role came responsibility for the budget. Sometime after midnight she decided that, whatever happened, she was going to have to get an accountant to help her. Ingela Oscarsson, who did the bookkeeping one day a week, had no responsibility for the budget and was not at all helpful when it came to making decisions about how much a freelancer should be paid or whether they could afford to buy a new laser printer that was not already included in the sum earmarked for capital investments or I.T. upgrades. In practice it was a ridiculous situation – Millennium was making a profit, but that was because Berger had always managed to balance an extremely tight budget. Instead of investing in something as fundamental as a new colour laser printer for 45,000 kronor, they would have to settle for a black-and-white printer for 8,000 instead.

For a moment she envied Berger. At S.M.P. she had a budget in which such a cost would be considered pin money.

Millennium’s financial situation had been healthy at the last annual general meeting, but the surplus in the budget was primarily made up of the profits from Blomkvist’s book about the Wennerström affair. The revenue that had been set aside for investment was shrinking alarmingly fast. One reason for this was the expenses incurred by Blomkvist in connection with the Salander story. Millennium did not have the resources to keep any employee on an open-ended budget with all sorts of expenses in the form of rental cars, hotel rooms, taxis, purchase of research material, new mobile telephones and the like.

Eriksson signed an invoice from Daniel Olsson in Göteborg. She sighed. Blomkvist had approved a sum of 14,000 kronor for a week’s research on a story that was not now going to be published. Payment to an Idris Ghidi went into the budget under fees to sources who could not be named, which meant that the accountant would remonstrate about the lack of an invoice or receipt and insist that the matter have the board’s approval. Millennium had paid a fee to Advokat Giannini which was supposed to come out of the general fund, but she had also invoiced Millennium for train tickets and other costs.

She put down her pen and looked at the totals. Blomkvist had blown 150,000 kronor on the Salander story, way beyond their budget. Things could not go on this way.

She was going to have to have a talk with him.

Berger spent the evening not on her sofa watching T.V., but in A.&E. at Nacka hospital. The shard of glass had penetrated so deeply that the bleeding would not stop. It turned out that one piece had broken off and was still in her heel, and would have to be removed. She was given a local anaesthetic and afterwards the wound was sewn up with three stitches.

Berger cursed the whole time she was at the hospital, and she kept trying to call her husband or Blomkvist. Neither chose to answer the telephone. By 10.00 she had her foot wrapped in a thick bandage. She was given crutches and took a taxi home.

She spent a while limping around the living room, sweeping up the floor. She called Emergency Glass to order a new window. She was in luck. It had been a quiet evening and they arrived within twenty minutes. But the living-room window was so big that they did not have the glass in stock. The glazier offered to board up the window with plywood for the time being, and she accepted gratefully.

As the plywood was being put up, she called the duty officer at Nacka Integrated Protection, and asked why the hell their expensive burglar alarm had not gone off when someone threw a brick through her biggest window.

Someone from N.I.P. came out to look at the damage. It turned out that whoever had installed the alarm several years before had neglected to connect the leads from the windows in the living room.

Berger was furious.

The man from N.I.P. said they would fix it first thing in the morning. Berger told him not to bother. Instead she called the duty officer at Milton Security and explained her situation. She said that she wanted to have a complete alarm package installed the next morning. I know I have to sign a contract, but tell Armansky that Erika Berger called and make damn sure someone comes round in the morning.

Then, finally, she called the police. She was told that there was no car available to come and take her statement. She was advised to contact her local station in the morning. Thank you. Fuck off.

Then she sat and fumed for a long time until her adrenaline level dropped and it began to sink in that she was going to have to sleep alone in a house without an alarm while somebody was running around the neighbourhood calling her a whore and smashing her windows.

She wondered whether she ought to go into the city to spend the night at a hotel, but Berger was not the kind of person who liked to be threatened. And she liked giving in to threats even less.

But she did take some elementary safety precautions.

Blomkvist had told her once how Salander had put paid to the serial killer Martin Vanger with a golf club. So she went to the garage and spent several minutes looking for her golf bag, which she had hardly even thought about for fifteen years. She chose an iron that she thought had a certain heft to it and laid it within easy reach of her bed. She left a putter in the hall and an 8-iron in the kitchen. She took a hammer from the tool box in the basement and put that in the master bathroom too.

She put the canister of Mace from her shoulder bag on her bedside table. Finally she found a rubber doorstop and wedged it under the bedroom door. And then she almost hoped that the moron who had called her a whore and destroyed her window would be stupid enough to come back that night.

By the time she felt sufficiently entrenched it was 1.00. She had to be at S.M.P. at 8.00. She checked her diary and saw that she had four meetings, the first at 10.00. Her foot was aching badly. She undressed and crept into bed.

Then, inevitably, she lay awake and worried.

Whore.

She had received nine emails, all of which had contained the word “whore,” and they all seemed to come from sources in the media. The first had come from her own newsroom, but the source was a fake.

She got out of bed and took out the new Dell laptop that she had been given when she had started at S.M.P.

The first email – which was also the most crude and intimidating with its suggestion that she would be fucked with a screwdriver – had come on May 16, a couple of weeks ago.

Email number two had arrived two days later, on May 18.

Then a week went by before the emails started coming again, now at intervals of about twenty-four hours. Then the attack on her home. Again, whore.

During that time Carlsson on the culture pages had received an ugly email purportedly sent by Berger. And if Carlsson had received an email like that, it was entirely possible that the emailer had been busy elsewhere too – that other people had got mail apparently from her that she did not know about.

It was an unpleasant thought.

The most disturbing was the attack on her house.

Someone had taken the trouble to find out where she lived, drive out here, and throw a brick through the window. It was obviously premeditated – the attacker had brought his can of spray paint. The next moment she froze when she realized that she could add another attack to the list. All four of her tyres had been slashed when she spent the night with Blomkvist at the Slussen Hilton.

The conclusion was just as unpleasant as it was obvious. She was being stalked.

Someone, for some unknown reason, had decided to harass her.

The fact that her home had been subject to an attack was understandable – it was where it was and impossible to disguise. But if her car had been damaged on some random street in Södermalm, her stalker must have been somewhere nearby when she parked it. They must have been following her.

CHAPTER 18

Berger’s mobile was ringing. It was 9.05.

“Good morning, Fru Berger. Dragan Armansky. I understand you called last night.”

Berger explained what had happened and asked whether Milton Security could take over the contract from Nacka Integrated Protection.

“We can certainly install an alarm that will work,” Armansky said. “The problem is that the closest car we have at night is in Nacka centre. Response time would be about thirty minutes. If we took the job I’d have to subcontract out your house. We have an agreement with a local security company, Adam Security in Fisksätra, which has a response time of ten minutes if all goes as it should.”

“That would be an improvement on N.I.P., which doesn’t bother to turn up at all.”

“It’s a family-owned business, a father, two sons, and a couple of cousins. Greeks, good people. I’ve known the father for many years. They handle coverage about 320 days a year. They tell us in advance the days they aren’t available because of holidays or something else, and then our car in Nacka takes over.”

“That works for me.”

“I’ll be sending a man out this morning. His name is David Rosin, and in fact he’s already on his way. He’s going to do a security assessment. He needs your keys if you’re not going to be home, and he needs your authorization to do a thorough examination of your house, from top to bottom. He’s going to take pictures of the entire property and the immediate surroundings.”

“Alright.”

“Rosin has a lot of experience, and we’ll make you a proposal. We’ll have a complete security plan ready in a few days which will include a personal attack alarm, fire security, evacuation and break-in protection.”

“O.K.”

“If anything should happen, we also want you to know what to do in the ten minutes before the car arrives from Fisksätra.”

“Sounds good.”

“We’ll install the alarm this afternoon. Then we’ll have to sign a contract.”

Only after she had finished her conversation with Armansky did Berger realize that she had overslept. She picked up her mobile to call Fredriksson and explained that she had hurt herself. He would have to cancel the 10.00.

“What’s happened?” he said.

“I cut my foot,” Berger said. “I’ll hobble in as soon as I’ve pulled myself together.”

She used the toilet in the master bathroom and then pulled on some black trousers and borrowed one of Greger’s slippers for her injured foot. She chose a black blouse and put on a jacket. Before she removed the doorstop from the bedroom door, she armed herself with the canister of Mace.

She made her way cautiously through the house and switched on the coffeemaker. She had her breakfast at the kitchen table, listening out for sounds in the vicinity. She had just poured a second cup of coffee when there was a firm knock on the front door. It was David Rosin from Milton Security.

Figuerola walked to Bergsgatan and summoned her four colleagues for an early morning conference.

“We’ve got a deadline now,” she said. “Our work has to be done by July 13, the day the Salander trial begins. We have just under six weeks. Let’s agree on what’s most important right now. Who wants to go first?”

Berglund cleared his throat. “The blond man with Mårtensson. Who is he?”

“We have photographs, but no idea how to find him. We can’t put out an A.P.B.”

“What about Gullberg, then? There must be a story to track down there. We have him in the Secret State Police from the early ’50s to 1964, when S.I.S. was founded. Then he vanishes.”

Figuerola nodded.

“Should we conclude that the Zalachenko club was an association formed in 1964? That would be some time before Zalachenko even came to Sweden.”

“There must have been some other purpose… a secret organization within the organization.”

“That was after Stig Wennerström. Everyone was paranoid.”

“A sort of secret spy police?”

“There are in fact parallels overseas. In the States a special group of internal spy chasers was created within the C.I.A. in the ’60s. It was led by a James Jesus Angleton, and it very nearly sabotaged the entire C.I.A. Angleton’s gang were as fanatical as they were paranoid – they suspected everyone in the C.I.A. of being a Russian agent. As a result the agency’s effectiveness in large areas was paralysed.”

“But that’s all speculation…”

“Where are the old personnel files kept?”

“Gullberg isn’t in them. I’ve checked.”

“But what about a budget? An operation like this has to be financed.”

The discussion went on until lunchtime, when Figuerola excused herself and went to the gym for some peace, to think things over.

Berger did not arrive in the newsroom until lunchtime. Her foot was hurting so badly that she could not put any weight on it. She hobbled over to her glass cage and sank into her chair with relief. Fredriksson looked up from his desk and she waved him in.

“What happened?” he said.

“I trod on a piece of glass and a shard lodged in my heel.”

“That… wasn’t so good.”

“No. It wasn’t good. Peter, has anyone received any more weird emails?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“O.K. Keep your ears open. I want to know if anything odd happens around S.M.P.”

“What sort of odd?”

“I’m afraid some idiot is sending really vile emails and he seems to have targeted me. So I want to know if you hear of anything going on.”

“The type of email Eva Carlsson got?”

“Right, but anything strange at all. I’ve had a whole string of crazy emails accusing me of being all kinds of things – and suggesting various perverse things that ought to be done to me.”

Fredriksson’s expression darkened. “How long has this been going on?”

“A couple of weeks. Keep your eyes peeled… So tell me, what’s going to be in the paper tomorrow?”

“Well…”

“Well, what?”

“Holm and the head of the legal section are on the warpath.”

“Why is that?”

“Because of Frisk. You extended his contract and gave him a feature assignment. And he won’t tell anybody what it’s about.”

“He is forbidden to talk about it. My orders.”

“That’s what he says. Which means that Holm and the legal editor are up in arms.”

“I can see that they might be. Set up a meeting with legal at 3.00. I’ll explain the situation.”

“Holm is not best pleased –”

“I’m not best pleased with Holm, so we’re all square.”

“He’s so upset that he’s complained to the board.”

Berger looked up. Damn it. I’m going to have to face up to the Borgsjö problem.

“Borgsjö is coming in this afternoon and wants a meeting with you. I suspect it’s Holm’s doing.”

“O.K. What time?”

“2.00,” said Fredriksson, and he went back to his desk to write the midday memo.

Jonasson visited Salander during her lunch. She pushed away a plate of the health authority’s vegetable stew. As always, he did a brief examination of her, but she noticed that he was no longer putting much effort into it.

“You’ve recovered nicely,” he said.

“Hmm. You’ll have to do something about the food at this place.”

“What about it?”

“Couldn’t you get me a pizza?”

“Sorry. Way beyond the budget.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Lisbeth, we’re going to have a discussion about the state of your health tomorrow –”

“Understood. And I’ve recovered nicely.”

“You’re now well enough to be moved to Kronoberg prison. I might be able to postpone the move for another week, but my colleagues are going to start wondering.”

“You don’t need to do that.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. “I’m ready. And it had to happen sooner or later.”

“I’ll give the go-ahead tomorrow, then,” Jonasson said. “You’ll probably be transferred pretty soon.”

She nodded.

“It might be as early as this weekend. The hospital administration doesn’t want you here.”

“Who could blame them.”

“Er… that device of yours –”

“I’ll leave it in the recess behind the table here.” She pointed.

“Good idea.”

They sat in silence for a moment before Jonasson stood up.

“I have to check on my other patients.”

“Thanks for everything. I owe you one.”

“Just doing my job.”

“No. You’ve done a great deal more. I won’t forget it.”

Blomkvist entered police headquarters on Kungsholmen through the entrance on Polhemsgatan. Figuerola accompanied him up to the offices of the Constitutional Protection Unit. They exchanged only silent glances in the lift.

“Do you think it’s such a good idea for me to be hanging around at police H.Q.?” Blomkvist said. “Someone might see us together and start to wonder.”

“This will be our only meeting here. From now on we’ll meet in an office we’ve rented at Fridhemsplan. We get access tomorrow. But this will be O.K. Constitutional Protection is a small and more or less self-sufficient unit, and nobody else at S.I.S. cares about it. And we’re on a different floor from the rest of Säpo.”

He greeted Edklinth without shaking hands and said hello to two colleagues who were apparently part of his team. They introduced themselves only as Stefan and Anders. He smiled to himself.

“Where do we start?” he said.

“We could start by having some coffee… Monica?” Edklinth said.

“Thanks, that would be nice,” Figuerola said.

Edklinth had probably meant for her to serve the coffee. Blomkvist noticed that the chief of the Constitutional Protection Unit hesitated for only a second before he got up and brought the thermos over to the conference table, where place settings were already laid out. Blomkvist saw that Edklinth was also smiling to himself, which he took to be a good sign. Then Edklinth turned serious.

“I honestly don’t know how I should be managing this. It must be the first time a journalist has sat in on a meeting of the Security Police. The issues we’ll be discussing now are in very many respects confidential and highly classified.”

“I’m not interested in military secrets. I’m only interested in the Zalachenko club.”

“But we have to strike a balance. First of all, the names of today’s participants must not be mentioned in your articles.”

“Agreed.”

Edklinth gave Blomkvist a look of surprise.

“Second, you may not speak with anyone but myself and Monica Figuerola. We’re the ones who will decide what we can tell you.”

“If you have a long list of requirements, you should have mentioned them yesterday.”

“Yesterday I hadn’t yet thought through the matter.”

“Then I have something to tell you too. This is probably the first and only time in my professional career that I will reveal the contents of an unpublished story to a police officer. So, to quote you… I honestly don’t know how I should be managing this.”

A brief silence settled over the table.

“Maybe we –”

“What if we –”

Edklinth and Figuerola had started talking at the same time before falling silent.

“My target is the Zalachenko club,” Blomkvist said. “You want to bring charges against the Zalachenko club. Let’s stick to that.”

Edklinth nodded.

“So, what have you got?” Blomkvist said.

Edklinth explained what Figuerola and her team had unearthed. He showed Blomkvist the photograph of Evert Gullberg with Colonel Wennerström.

“Good. I’ll have a copy of that.”

“It’s in Åhlen’s archive,” Figuerola said.

“It’s on the table in front of me. With text on the back,” Blomkvist said.

“Give him a copy,” Edklinth said.

“That means that Zalachenko was murdered by the Section.”

“Murder, coupled with the suicide of a man who was dying of cancer. Gullberg’s still alive, but the doctors don’t give him more than a few weeks. After his suicide attempt he sustained such severe brain damage that he is to all intents and purposes a vegetable.”

“And he was the person with primary responsibility for Zalachenko when he defected.”

“How do you know that?”

“Gullberg met Prime Minister Fälldin six weeks after Zalachenko’s defection.”

“Can you prove that?”

“I can. The visitors’ log of the government Secretariat. Gullberg arrived together with the then chief of S.I.S.”

“And the chief has since died.”

“But Fälldin is alive and willing to talk about the matter.”

“Have you –”

“No, I haven’t. But someone else has. I can’t give you the name. Source protection.”

Blomkvist explained how Fälldin had reacted to the information about Zalachenko and how he had travelled to the Hague to interview Janeryd.

“So the Zalachenko club is somewhere in this building,” Blomkvist said, pointing at the photograph.

“Partly. We think it’s an organization inside the organization. What you call the Zalachenko club cannot exist without the support of key people in this building. But we think that the so-called Section for Special Analysis set up shop somewhere outside.”

“So that’s how it works? A person can be employed by Säpo, have his salary paid by Säpo, and then in fact report to another employer?”

“Something like that.”

“So who in the building is working for the Zalachenko club?”

“We don’t know yet. But we have several suspects.”

“Mårtensson,” Blomkvist suggested.

Edklinth nodded.

“Mårtensson works for Säpo, and when he’s needed by the Zalachenko club he’s released from his regular job,” Figuerola said.

“How does that work in practice?”

“That’s a very good question,” Edklinth said with a faint smile. “Wouldn’t you like to come and work for us?”

“Not on your life,” Blomkvist said.

“I jest, of course. But it’s a good question. We have a suspect, but we’re unable to verify our suspicions just yet.”

“Let’s see… it must be someone with administrative authority.”

“We suspect Chief of Secretariat Albert Shenke,” Figuerola said.

“And here we are at our first stumbling block,” Edklinth said. “We’ve given you a name, but we have no proof. So how do you intend to proceed?”

“I can’t publish a name without proof. If Shenke is innocent he would sue Millennium for libel.”

“Good. Then we are agreed. This co-operative effort has to be based on mutual trust. Your turn. What have you got?”

“Three names,” Blomkvist said. “The first two were members of the Zalachenko club in the ’80s.”

Edklinth and Figuerola were instantly alert.

“Hans von Rottinger and Fredrik Clinton. Von Rottinger is dead. Clinton is retired. But both of them were part of the circle closest to Zalachenko.”

“And the third name?” Edklinth said.

“Teleborian has a link to a person I know only as Jonas. We don’t know his last name, but we do know that he was with the Zalachenko club in 2005… We’ve actually speculated a bit that he might be the man with Mårtensson in the pictures from Café Copacabana.”

“And in what context did the name Jonas crop up?”

Salander hacked Teleborian’s computer, and we can follow the correspondence that shows how Teleborian is conspiring with Jonas in the same way he conspired with Björck in 1991.

“He gives Teleborian instructions. And now we come to another stumbling block,” Blomkvist said to Edklinth with a smile. “I can prove my assertions, but I can’t give you the documentation without revealing a source. You’ll have to accept what I’m saying.”

Edklinth looked thoughtful.

“Maybe one of Teleborian’s colleagues in Uppsala. O.K. Let’s start with Clinton and von Rottinger. Tell us what you know.”

Borgsjö received Berger in his office next to the boardroom. He looked concerned.

“I heard that you hurt yourself,” he said, pointing to her foot.

“It’ll pass,” Berger said, leaning her crutches against his desk as she sat down in the visitor’s chair.

“Well… that’s good. Erika, you’ve been here a month and I want us to have a chance to catch up. How do you feel it’s going?”

I have to discuss Vitavara with him. But how? When?

“I’ve begun to get a handle on the situation. There are two sides to it. On the one hand, S.M.P. has financial problems and the budget is strangling the newspaper. On the other, S.M.P. has a huge amount of dead meat in the newsroom.”

“Aren’t there any positive aspects?”

“Of course there are. A whole bunch of experienced professionals who know how to do their jobs. The problem is the ones who won’t let them do their jobs.”

“Holm has spoken to me…”

“I know.”

Borgsjö looked puzzled. “He has a number of opinions about you. Almost all of them are negative.”

“That’s O.K. I have a number of opinions about him too.”

“Negative too? It’s no good if the two of you can’t work together –”

“I have no problem working with him. But he does have a problem with me.” Berger sighed. “He’s driving me nuts. He’s very experienced and doubtless one of the most competent news chiefs I’ve come across. At the same time he’s a bastard of exceptional proportions. He enjoys indulging in intrigue and playing people against each other. I’ve worked in the media for twenty-five years and I have never met a person like him in a management position.”

“He has to be tough to handle the job. He’s under pressure from every direction.”

“Tough… by all means. But that doesn’t mean he has to behave like an idiot. Unfortunately Holm is a walking disaster, and he’s one of the chief reasons why it’s almost impossible to get the staff to work as a team. He takes divide-and-rule as his job description.”

“Harsh words.”

“I’ll give him one month to sort out his attitude. If he hasn’t managed it by then, I’m going to remove him as news editor.”

“You can’t do that. It’s not your job to take apart the operational organization.”

Berger studied the chairman of the board.

“Forgive me for pointing this out, but that was exactly why you hired me. We also have a contract which explicitly gives me free rein to make the editorial changes I deem necessary. My task here is to rejuvenate the newspaper, and I can do that only by changing the organization and the work routines.”

“Holm has devoted his life to S.M.P.”

“Right. And he’s fifty-eight with six years to go before retirement. I can’t afford to keep him on as a dead weight all that time. Don’t misunderstand me, Magnus. From the moment I sat down in that glass cage, my life’s goal has been to raise S.M.P.’s quality as well as its circulation figures. Holm has a choice: either he can do things my way, or he can do something else. I’m going to bulldoze anyone who is obstructive or who tries to damage S.M.P. in some other way.”

Damn… I’ve got to bring up the Vitavara thing. Borgsjö is going to be fired.

Suddenly Borgsjö smiled. “By God, I think you’re pretty tough too.”

“Yes, I am, and in this case it’s regrettable since it shouldn’t be necessary. My job is to produce a good newspaper, and I can do that only if I have a management that functions and colleagues who enjoy their work.”

After the meeting with Borgsjö, Berger limped back to the glass cage. She felt depressed. She had been with Borgsjö for forty-five minutes without mentioning one syllable about Vitavara. She had not, in other words, been particularly straight or honest with him.

When she sat at her computer she found a message from MikBlom@millennium.nu›. She knew perfectly well that no such address existed at Millennium. She opened the email:

She raised her eyes involuntarily and looked out across the newsroom. Her gaze fell on Holm. He looked back at her. Then he smiled.

It can only be someone at S.M.P.

The meeting at the Constitutional Protection Unit lasted until after 5.00, and they agreed to have another meeting the following week. Blomkvist could contact Figuerola if he needed to be in touch with S.I.S. before then. He packed away his laptop and stood up.

“How do I get out of here?” he asked.

“You certainly can’t go running around on your own,” Edklinth said.

“I’ll show him out,” Figuerola said. “Give me a couple of minutes, I just have to pick up a few things from my office.”

They walked together through Kronoberg park towards Fridhemsplan.

“So what happens now?” Blomkvist said.

“We stay in touch,” Figuerola said.

“I’m beginning to like my contact with Säpo.”

“Do you feel like having dinner later?”

“Bosnian again?”

“No, I can’t afford to eat out every night. I was thinking of something simple at my place.”

She stopped and smiled at him.

“Do you know what I’d like to do now?” she said.

“No.”

“I’d like to take you home and undress you.”

“This could get a bit awkward.”

“I know. But I hadn’t thought of telling my boss.”

“We don’t know how this story’s going to turn out. We could end up on opposite sides of the barricades.”

“I’ll take my chances. Now, are you going to come quietly or do I have to handcuff you?”

The consultant from Milton Security was waiting for Berger when she got home at around 7.00. Her foot was throbbing painfully, and she limped into the kitchen and sank on to the nearest chair. He had made coffee and he poured her some.

“Thanks. Is making coffee part of Milton’s service agreement?”

He gave her a polite smile. David Rosin was a short, plump man in his fifties with a reddish goatee. “Thanks for letting me borrow your kitchen today.”

“It’s the least I could do. What’s the situation?”

“Our technicians were here and installed a proper alarm. I’ll show you how it works in a minute. I’ve also gone over every inch of your house from the basement to the attic and studied the area around it. I’ll review your situation with my colleagues at Milton, and in a few days we’ll present an assessment that we’ll go over with you. But before that there are one or two things we ought to discuss.”

“Go ahead.”

“First of all, we have to take care of a few formalities. We’ll work out the final contract later – it depends what services we agree on – but this is an agreement saying that you’ve commissioned Milton Security to install the alarm we put in today. It’s a standard document saying that we at Milton require certain things of you and that we commit to certain things, client confidentiality and so forth.”

“You require things of me?”

“Yes. An alarm is an alarm and is completely pointless if some nutcase is standing in your living room with an automatic weapon. For the security to work, we want you and your husband to be aware of certain things and to take certain routine measures. I’ll go over the details with you.”

“O.K.”

“I’m jumping ahead and anticipating the final assessment, but this is how I view the general situation. You and your husband live in a detached house. You have a beach at the back of the house and a few large houses in the immediate vicinity. Your neighbours do not have an unobstructed view of your house. It’s relatively isolated.”

“That’s correct.”

“Therefore an intruder would have a good chance of approaching your house without being observed.”

“The neighbours on the right are away for long periods, and on the left is an elderly couple who go to bed quite early.”

“Precisely. In addition, the houses are positioned with their gables facing each other. There are few windows, and so on. Once an intruder comes on to your property – and it takes only five seconds to turn off the road and arrive at the rear of the house – then the view is completely blocked. The rear is screened by your hedge, the garage, and that large freestanding building.”

“That’s my husband’s studio.”

“He’s an artist, I take it?”

“That’s right. Then what?”

“Whoever smashed your window and sprayed your outside wall was able to do so undisturbed. There might have been some risk that the sound of the breaking window would be heard and someone might have reacted… but your house sits at an angle and the sound was deflected by the facade.”

“I see.”

“The second thing is that you have a large property here with a living area of approximately 250 square metres, not counting the attic and basement. That’s eleven rooms on two floors.”

“The house is a monster. It’s my husband’s old family home.”

“There are also a number of different ways to get into the house. Via the front door, the balcony at the back, the porch on the upper floor, and the garage. There are also windows on the ground floor and six basement windows that were left without alarms by our predecessors. Finally, I could break in by using the fire escape at the back of the house and entering through the roof hatch leading to the attic. The trapdoor is secured by nothing more than a latch.”

“It sounds as if there are revolving doors into the place. What do we have to do?”

“The alarm we installed today is temporary. We’ll come back next week and do the proper installation with alarms on every window on the ground floor and in the basement. That’s your protection against intruders in the event that you and your husband are away.”

“That’s good.”

“But the present situation has arisen because you have been subject to a direct threat from a specific individual. That’s much more serious. We don’t know who this person is, what his motives are, or how far he’s willing to go, but we can make a few assumptions. If it were just a matter of anonymous hate mail we would make a decreased threat assessment, but in this case a person has actually taken the trouble to drive to your house – and it’s pretty far to Saltsjöbaden – to carry out an attack. That is worrisome.”

“I agree with you there.”

“I talked with Dragan today, and we’re of the same mind: until we know more about the person making the threat, we have to play it safe.”

“Which means –”

“First of all, the alarm we installed today contains two components. On the one hand it’s an ordinary burglar alarm which is on when you’re not at home, but it’s also a sensor for the ground floor that you’ll have to turn on when you’re upstairs at night.”

“Hmm.”

“It’s an inconvenience because you have to turn off the alarm every time you come downstairs.”

“I’ve got you.”

“Second, we changed your bedroom door today.”

“You changed the whole door?”

“Yes. We installed a steel safety door. Don’t worry… it’s painted white and looks just like a normal bedroom door. The difference is that it locks automatically when you close it. To open the door from the inside you just have to press down the handle as on any normal door. But to open the door from the outside, you have to enter a three-digit code on a plate on the door handle.”

“And you’ve done all this today…”

“If you’re threatened in your home then you have a safe room into which you can barricade yourself. The walls are sturdy and it would take quite a while to break down that door even if your assailant had tools at hand.”

“That’s a comfort.”

“Third, we’re going to install surveillance cameras, so that you’ll be able to see what’s going on in the garden and on the ground floor when you’re in the bedroom. That will be done later this week, at the same time as we install the movement detectors outside the house.”

“It sounds like the bedroom won’t be such a romantic place in the future.”

“It’s a small monitor. We can put it inside a wardrobe or a cabinet so that it isn’t in full view.”

“Thank you.”

“Later in the week I’ll change the doors in your study and in a downstairs room too. If anything happens you should quickly seek shelter and lock the door while you wait for assistance.”

“Alright.”

“If you trip the burglar alarm by mistake, then you’ll have to call Milton’s alarm centre immediately to cancel the emergency vehicle. To cancel it you’ll have to give a password that will be registered with us. If you forget the password, the emergency vehicle will come out anyway and you’ll be charged a fee.”

“Understood.”

“Fourth, there are now attack alarms in four places inside the house. Here in the kitchen, in the hall, in your study upstairs, and in your bedroom. The attack alarm consists of two buttons that you press simultaneously and hold down for three seconds. You can do it with one hand, but you can’t do it by mistake. If the attack alarm is sounded, three things will happen. First, Milton will send cars out here. The closest car will come from Adam Security in Fisksätra. Two strong men will be here in ten to twelve minutes. Second, a car from Milton will come down from Nacka. For that the response time is at best twenty minutes but more likely twenty-five. Third, the police will be alerted automatically. In other words, several cars will arrive at the scene within a short time, a matter of minutes.”

“O.K.”

“An attack alarm can’t be cancelled the same way you would cancel the burglar alarm. You can’t call and say that it was a mistake. Even if you meet us in the driveway and say it was a mistake, the police will enter the house. We want to be sure that nobody’s holding a gun to your husband’s head or anything like that. So you use the attack alarm, obviously, only when there is real danger.”

“I understand.”

“It doesn’t have to be a physical attack. It could be if someone is trying to break in or turns up in the garden or something like that. If you feel threatened in any way, you should set off the alarm, but use your good judgement.”

“I promise.”

“I notice that you have golf clubs planted here and there around the house.”

“Yes. I slept here alone last night.”

“I myself would have checked into a hotel. I have no problem with you taking safety precautions on your own. But you ought to know that you could easily kill an intruder with a golf club.”

“Hmm.”

“And if you did that, you would most probably be charged with manslaughter. If you admitted that you put golf clubs around the place with the intent of arming yourself, it could also be classified as murder.”

“If someone attacks me then the chances are that I do intend to bash in that person’s skull.”

“I understand you. But the point of hiring Milton Security is so that you have an alternative to doing that. You should be able to call for help, and above all you shouldn’t end up in a situation where you have to bash in someone’s skull.”

“I’m only too happy to hear it.”

“And, by the way, what would you do with the golf clubs if an intruder had a gun? The key to good security is all about staying one step ahead of anyone who means you harm.”

“Tell me how I’m supposed to do that if I have a stalker after me?”

“You see to it that he never has a chance to get close to you. Now, we won’t be finished with the installations here for a couple of days, and then we’ll also have to have a talk with your husband. He’ll have to be as safety-conscious as you are.”

“He will be.”

“Until then I’d rather you didn’t stay here.”

“I can’t move anywhere else. My husband will be home in a couple of days. But both he and I travel fairly often, and one or other of us has to be here alone from time to time.”

“I understand. But I’m only talking about a couple of days until we have all the installations ready. Isn’t there a friend you could stay with?”

Berger thought for a moment about Blomkvist’s apartment but remembered that just now it was not such a good idea.

“Thanks, but I’d rather stay here.”

“I was afraid of that. In that case, I’d like you to have company here for the rest of the week.”

“Well…”

“Do you have a friend who could come and stay with you?”

“Sure. But not at 7.30 in the evening if there’s a nutcase on the prowl outside.”

Rosin thought for a moment. “Do you have anything against a Milton employee staying here? I could call and find out if my colleague Susanne Linder is free tonight. She certainly wouldn’t mind earning a few hundred kronor on the side.”

“What would it cost exactly?”

“You’d have to negotiate that with her. It would be outside all our formal agreements. But I really don’t want you to stay here alone.”

“I’m not afraid of the dark.”

“I didn’t think you were or you wouldn’t have slept here last night. Susanne Linder is also a former policewoman. And it’s only temporary. If we had to arrange for bodyguard protection that would be a different matter – and it would be rather expensive.”

Rosin’s seriousness was having an effect. It dawned on her that here he was calmly talking of the possibility of there being a threat to her life. Was he exaggerating? Should she dismiss his professional caution? In that case, why had she telephoned Milton Security in the first place and asked them to install an alarm?

“O.K. Call her. I’ll get the spare room ready.”

It was not until after 10.00 p.m. that Figuerola and Blomkvist wrapped sheets around themselves and went to her kitchen to make a cold pasta salad with tuna and bacon from the leftovers in her fridge. They drank water with their dinner.

Figuerola giggled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’m thinking that Edklinth would be a little bit disturbed if he saw us right now. I don’t believe he intended for me to go to bed with you when he told me to keep a close eye on you.”

“You started it. I had the choice of being handcuffed or coming quietly,” Blomkvist said.

“True, but you weren’t very hard to convince.”

“Maybe you aren’t aware of this – though I doubt that – but you give off the most incredible sexual vibrations. Who on earth do you think can resist that?”

“You’re very kind, but I’m not that sexy. And I don’t have sex quite that often either.”

“You amaze me.”

“I don’t, and I don’t end up in bed with that many men. I was going out with a guy this spring. But it ended.”

“Why was that?”

“He was sweet, but it turned into a wearisome sort of arm-wrestling contest. I was stronger than he was and he couldn’t bear it. Are you the kind of man who’ll want to arm-wrestle me?”

“You mean, am I someone who has a problem with the fact that you’re fitter and physically stronger than I am? No, I’m not.”

“Thanks for being honest. I’ve noticed that quite a few men get interested, but then they start challenging me and looking for ways to dominate me. Especially if they discover I’m a policewoman.”

“I’m not going to compete with you. I’m better than you are at what I do. And you’re better than I am at what you do.”

“I can live with that attitude.”

“Why did you pick me up?”

“I give in to impulses. And you were one of them!”

“But you’re an officer in Säpo, of all places, and we’re in the middle of an investigation in which I’m involved…”

“You mean it was unprofessional of me. You’re right. I shouldn’t have done it. And I’d have a serious problem if it became known. Edklinth would go through the roof.”

“I won’t tell him.”

“Very chivalrous.”

They were silent for a moment.

“I don’t know what this is going to turn into. You’re a man who gets more than his fair share of action, as I gather. Is that accurate?”

“Yes, unfortunately. And I may not be looking for a steady girlfriend.”

“Fair warning. I’m probably not looking for a steady boyfriend either. Can we keep it on a friendly level?”

“I think that would be best. Monica, I’m not going to tell anybody that we got together. But if we aren’t careful I could end up in one hell of a conflict with your colleagues.”

“I don’t think so. Edklinth is as straight as a die. And we share the same objective, you and my people.”

“We’ll see how it goes.”

“You had a thing with Lisbeth Salander too.”

Blomkvist looked at her. “Listen… I’m not an open book for everyone to read. My relationship with Lisbeth is none of anyone’s business.”

“She’s Zalachenko’s daughter.”

“Yes, and she has to live with that. But she isn’t Zalachenko. There’s the world of difference.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I was wondering about your involvement in this story.”

“Lisbeth is my friend. That should be enough of an explanation.”

Linder from Milton Security was dressed in jeans, a black leather jacket and running shoes. She arrived in Saltsjöbaden at 9.00 in the evening and Rosin showed her around the house. She had brought a green military bag containing her laptop, a spring baton, a Mace canister, handcuffs and a toothbrush, which she unpacked in Berger’s spare room.

Berger made coffee.

“Thanks for the coffee. You’re probably thinking of me as a guest you have to entertain. The fact is, I’m not a guest at all. I’m a necessary evil that’s suddenly appeared in your life, albeit just for a couple of days. I was in the police for six years and I’ve worked at Milton for four. I’m a trained bodyguard.”

“I see.”

“There’s a threat against you and I’m here to be a gatekeeper so that you can sleep in peace or work or read a book or do whatever you feel like doing. If you need to talk, I’m happy to listen. Otherwise, I brought my own book.”

“Understood.”

“What I mean is that you should go on with your life and not feel as though you need to entertain me. Then I’d just be in the way. The best thing would be for you to think of me as a temporary work colleague.”

“Well, I’m certainly not used to this kind of situation. I’ve had threats before, when I was editor-in-chief at Millennium, but then it was to do with my work. Right now it’s some seriously unpleasant individual –”

“Who’s got a hang-up about you in particular.”

“Something along those lines.”

“If we have to arrange full bodyguard protection, it’ll cost a lot of money. And for it to be worth the cost, there has to be a very clear and specific threat. This is just an extra job for me. I’ll ask you for 500 kronor a night to sleep here the rest of the week. It’s cheap and far below what I would charge if I took the job for Milton. Is that O.K. with you?”

“It’s completely O.K.”

“If anything happens, I want you to lock yourself in your bedroom and let me handle the situation. Your job is to press the attack alarm. That’s all. I don’t want you underfoot if there’s any trouble.”

Berger went to bed at 11.00. She heard the click of the lock as she closed her bedroom door. Deep in thought, she undressed and climbed into bed.

She had been told not to feel obliged to entertain her “guest,” but she had spent two hours with Linder at the kitchen table. She discovered that they got along famously. They had discussed the psychology that causes certain men to stalk women. Linder told her that she did not hold with psychological mumbo-jumbo. She thought the most important thing was simply to stop the bastards, and she enjoyed her job at Milton Security a great deal, since her assignments were largely to act as a counter-force to raging lunatics.

“So why did you resign from the police force?” Berger said.

“A better question would be why did I become a police officer in the first place.”

“Why did you become a police officer?”

“Because when I was seventeen a close friend of mine was mugged and raped in a car by three utter bastards. I became a police officer because I thought, rather idealistically, that the police existed to prevent crimes like that.”

“Well –”

“I couldn’t prevent shit. As a policewoman I invariably arrived on the scene after a crime had been committed. I couldn’t cope with the arrogant lingo on the squad. And I soon found out that some crimes are never even investigated. You’re a typical example. Did you try to call the police about what happened?”

“Yes.”

“And did they bother to come out here?”

“Not really. I was told to file a report at the local station.”

“So now you know. I work for Armansky, and I come into the picture before a crime is committed.”

“Mostly to do with women who are threatened?”

“I work with all kinds of things. Security assessments, bodyguard protection, surveillance and so on. But the work is often to do with people who have been threatened. I get on considerably better at Milton than on the force, although there’s a drawback.”

“What’s that?”

“We are only there for clients who can pay.”

As she lay in bed Berger thought about what Linder had said. Not everyone can afford security. She herself had accepted Rosin’s proposal for several new doors, engineers, back-up alarm systems and everything else without blinking. The cost of all that work would be almost 50,000 kronor. But she could afford it.

She pondered for a moment her suspicion that the person threatening her had something to do with S.M.P. Whoever it was had known that she had hurt her foot. She thought of Holm. She did not like him, which added to her mistrust of him, but the news that she had been injured had spread fast from the second she appeared in the newsroom on crutches.

And she had the Borgsjö problem.

She suddenly sat up in bed and frowned, looking around the bedroom. She wondered where she had put Cortez’s file on Borgsjö and Vitavara Inc.

She got up, put on her dressing gown and leaned on a crutch. She went to her study and turned on the light. No, she had not been in her study since… since she had read through the file in the bath the night before. She had put it on the windowsill.

She looked in the bathroom. It was not on the windowsill.

She stood there for a while, worrying.

She had no memory of seeing the folder that morning. She had not moved it anywhere else.

She turned ice-cold and spent the next five minutes searching the bathroom and going through the stacks of papers and newspapers in the kitchen and bedroom. In the end she had to admit that the folder was gone.

Between the time when she had stepped on the shard of glass and Rosin’s arrival that morning, somebody had gone into her bathroom and taken Millennium’s material about Vitavara Inc.

Then it occurred to her that she had other secrets in the house. She limped back to the bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the chest by her bed. Her heart sank like a stone. Everyone has secrets. She kept hers in the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Berger did not regularly write a diary, but there were periods when she had. There were also old love letters which she had kept from her teenage years.

There was an envelope with photographs that had been cool at the time, but… When Berger was twenty-five she had been involved in Club Xtreme, which arranged private dating parties for people who were into leather. There were photographs from various parties, and if she had been sober at the time, she would have recognized that she looked completely demented.

And – most disastrous of all – there was a video taken on holiday in the early ’90s when she and Greger had been guests of the glass artist Torkel Bollinger at his villa on the Costa del Sol. During the holiday Berger had discovered that her husband had a definite bisexual tendency, and they had both ended up in bed with Torkel. It had been a pretty wonderful holiday. Video cameras were still a relatively new phenomenon. The movie they had playfully made was definitely not for general release.

The drawer was empty.

How could I have been so bloody stupid?

On the bottom of the drawer someone had spray-painted the familiar five-letter word.

CHAPTER 19

Salander finished her autobiography at 4.00 on Friday morning and sent a copy to Blomkvist via the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]. Then she lay quite still in bed and stared at the ceiling.

She knew that on Walpurgis Night she had had her twenty-seventh birthday, but she had not even reflected on the fact at the time. She was imprisoned. She had experienced the same thing at St Stefan’s. If things did not go right for her there was a risk that she would spend many more birthdays in some form of confinement.

She was not going to accept a situation like that.

The last time she had been locked up she was scarcely into her teens. She was grown-up now, and had more knowledge and skills. She wondered how long it would take for her to escape and settle down safely in some other country to create a new identity and a new life for herself.

She got up from the bed and went to the bathroom where she looked in the mirror. She was no longer limping. She ran her fingers over her hip where the wound had healed to a scar. She twisted her arms and stretched her left shoulder back and forth. It was tight, but she was more or less healed. She tapped herself on the head. She supposed that her brain had not been too greatly damaged after being perforated by a bullet with a full-metal jacket.

She had been extraordinarily lucky.

Until she had access to a computer, she had spent her time trying to work out how to escape from this locked room at Sahlgrenska.

Then Dr Jonasson and Blomkvist had upset her plans by smuggling in her Palm. She had read Blomkvist’s articles and brooded over what he had to say. She had done a risk assessment and pondered his plan, weighing her chances. She had decided that for once she was going to do as he advised. She would test the system. Blomkvist had convinced her that she had nothing to lose, and he was offering her a chance to escape in a very different way. If the plan failed, she would simply have to plan her escape from St Stefan’s or whichever other nuthouse.

What actually convinced her to decide to play the game Blomkvist’s way was her desire for revenge.

She forgave nothing.

Zalachenko, Björck and Bjurman were dead.

Teleborian, on the other hand, was alive.

So too was her brother, the so-called Ronald Niedermann, even though in reality he was not her problem. Certainly, he had helped in the attempt to murder and bury her, but he seemed peripheral. If I run into him sometime, we’ll see, but until such time he’s the police’s problem.

Yet Blomkvist was right: behind the conspiracy there had to be others not known to her who had contributed to the shaping of her life. She had to put names and social security numbers to these people.

So she had decided to go along with Blomkvist’s plan. That was why she had written the plain, unvarnished truth about her life in a cracklingly terse autobiography of forty pages. She had been quite precise. Everything she had written was true. She had accepted Blomkvist’s reasoning that she had already been so savaged in the Swedish media by such grotesque libels that a little sheer nonsense could not possibly further damage her reputation.

The autobiography was a fiction in the sense that she had not, of course, told the whole truth. She had no intention of doing that.

She went back to bed and pulled the covers over her.

She felt a niggling irritation that she could not identify. She reached for a notebook, given to her by Giannini and hardly used. She turned to the first page, where she had written:

She had spent several weeks in the Caribbean last winter working herself into a frenzy over Fermat’s theorem. When she came back to Sweden, before she got mixed up in the hunt for Zalachenko, she had kept on playing with the equations. What was maddening was that she had the feeling she had seen a solution… that she had discovered a solution.

But she could not remember what it was.

Not being able to remember something was a phenomenon unknown to Salander. She had tested herself by going on the Net and picking out random H.T.M.L. codes that she glanced at, memorized, and reproduced exactly.

She had not lost her photographic memory, which she had always considered a curse.

Everything was running as usual in her head.

Save for the fact that she thought she recalled seeing a solution to Fermat’s theorem, but she could not remember how, when, or where.

The worst thing was that she did not have the least interest in it. Fermat’s theorem no longer fascinated her. That was ominous. That was just the way she usually functioned. She would be fascinated by a problem, but as soon as she had solved it, she lost interest.

That was how she felt about Fermat. He was no longer a demon riding on her shoulder, demanding her attention and vexing her intellect. It was an ordinary formula, some squiggles on a piece of paper, and she felt no desire at all to engage with it.

This bothered her. She put down the notebook.

She should get some sleep.

Instead she took out her Palm again and went on the Net. She thought for a moment and then went into Armansky’s hard drive, which she had not done since she got the hand-held. Armansky was working with Blomkvist, but she had not had any particular need to read what he was up to.

Absentmindedly she read his email.

She found the assessment Rosin had carried out of Berger’s house. She could scarcely believe what she was reading.

Erika Berger has a stalker.

She found a message from Susanne Linder, who had evidently stayed at Berger’s house the night before and who had emailed a report late that night. She looked at the time of the message. It had been sent just before 3.00 in the morning and reported Berger’s discovery that diaries, letters and photographs, along with a video of a personal nature, had been stolen from a chest of drawers in her bedroom.

Salander updated her download of Armansky’s hard drive and then switched off the Palm, lost in thought. She had mixed feelings.

She had no reason to love Berger. She remembered still the humiliation she had felt when she saw her walk off down Hornsgatan with Blomkvist the day before New Year’s Eve a year and a half ago.

It had been the stupidest moment of her life and she would never again allow herself those sorts of feelings.

She remembered the terrible hatred she had felt, and her desire to run after them and hurt Berger.

Embarrassing.

She was cured.

But she had no reason to sympathize with Berger.

She wondered what the video “of a personal nature” contained. She had her own film of a personal nature which showed how Advokat Bastard Bjurman had raped her. And it was now in Blomkvist’s keeping. She wondered how she would have reacted if someone had broken into her place and stolen the D.V.D. Which Blomkvist by definition had actually done, even though his motives were not to harm her.

Hmm. An awkward situation.

Berger had not been able to sleep on Thursday night. She hobbled restlessly back and forth while Linder kept a watchful eye on her. Her anxiety lay like a heavy fog over the house.

At 2.30 Linder managed to talk Berger into getting into bed to rest, even if she did not sleep. She heaved a sigh of relief when Berger closed her bedroom door. She opened her laptop and summarized the situation in an email to Armansky. She had scarcely sent the message before she heard that Berger was up and moving about again.

At 7.30 she made Berger call S.M.P. and take the day off sick. Berger had reluctantly agreed and then fallen asleep on the living-room sofa in front of the boarded-up picture window. Linder spread a blanket over her. Then she made some coffee and called Armansky, explaining her presence at the house and that she had been called in by Rosin.

“Stay there with Berger,” Armansky told her, “and get a couple of hours’ sleep yourself.”

“I don’t know how we’re going to bill this –”

“We’ll work that out later.”

Berger slept until 2.30. She woke up to find Linder sleeping in a recliner on the other side of the living room.

Figuerola slept late on Friday morning; she did not have time for her morning run. She blamed Blomkvist for this state of affairs as she showered and then rousted him out of bed.

Blomkvist drove to Millennium, where everyone was surprised to see him up so early. He mumbled something, made some coffee, and called Eriksson and Cortez into his office. They spent three hours going over the articles for the themed issue and keeping track of the book’s progress.

“Dag’s book went to the printer yesterday,” Eriksson said. “We’re going down the perfect-bound trade paperback route.”

“The special issue is going to be called The Lisbeth Salander Story,” Cortez said. “They’re bound to move the date of the trial, but at the moment it’s set for Wednesday, July 13. The magazine will be printed by then, but we haven’t fixed on a distribution date yet. You can decide nearer the time.”

“Good. That leaves the Zalachenko book, which right now is a nightmare. I’m calling it The Section. The first half is basically what’s in the magazine. It begins with the murders of Dag and Mia, and then follows the hunt for Salander first, then Zalachenko, and then Niedermann. The second half will be everything that we know about the Section.”

“Mikael, even if the printer breaks every record for us, we’re going to have to send them the camera-ready copy by the end of this month – at the latest,” Eriksson said. “Christer will need a couple of days for the layout, the typesetter, say, a week. So we have about two weeks left for the text. I don’t know how we’re going to make it.”

“We won’t have time to dig up the whole story,” Blomkvist conceded. “But I don’t think we could manage that even if we had a whole year. What we’re going to do in this book is to state what happened. If we don’t have a source for something, then I’ll say so. If we’re flying kites, we’ll make that clear. So, we’re going to write about what happened, what we can document, and what we believe to have happened.”

“That’s pretty vague,” Cortez said.

Blomkvist shook his head. “If I say that a Säpo agent broke into my apartment and I can document it – and him – with a video, then it’s documented. If I say that he did it on behalf of the Section, then that’s speculation, but in the light of all the facts we’re setting out, it’s a reasonable speculation. Does that make sense?”

“It does.”

“I won’t have time to write all the missing pieces myself. I have a list of articles here that you, Henry, will have to cobble together. It corresponds to about fifty pages of book text. Malin, you’re back-up for Henry, just as when we were editing Dag’s book. All three of our names will be on the cover and title page. Is that alright with you two?”

“That’s fine,” Eriksson said. “But we have other urgent problems.”

“Such as?”

“While you were concentrating on the Zalachenko story, we had a hell of a lot of work to do here –”

“You’re saying I wasn’t available?”

Eriksson nodded.

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize. We all know that when you’re in the throes of a story, nothing else matters. But that won’t work for the rest of us, and it definitely doesn’t work for me. Erika had me to lean on. I have Henry, and he’s an ace, but he’s putting in an equal amount of time on your story. Even if we count you in, we’re still two people short in editorial.”

“Two?”

“And I’m not Erika. She had a routine that I can’t compete with. I’m still learning this job. Monika is working her backside off. And so is Lottie. Nobody has a moment to stop and think.”

“This is all temporary. As soon as the trial begins –”

“No, Mikael. It won’t be over then. When the trial begins, it’ll be sheer hell. Remember what it was like during the Wennerström affair. We won’t see you for three months while you hop from one T.V. interview sofa to another.”

Blomkvist sighed. “What do you suggest?”

“If we’re going to run Millennium effectively during the autumn, we’re going to need new blood. Two people at least, maybe three. We just don’t have the editorial capacity for what we’re trying to do, and…”

“And?”

“And I’m not sure that I’m ready to do it.”

“I hear you, Malin.”

“I mean it. I’m a damn good assistant editor – it’s a piece of cake with Erika as your boss. We said that we were going to try this over the summer… well, we’ve tried it. I’m not a good editor-in-chief.”

“Stuff and nonsense,” Cortez said.

Eriksson shook her head.

“I hear what you’re saying,” Blomkvist said, “But remember that it’s been an extreme situation.”

Eriksson smiled at him sadly. “You could take this as a complaint from the staff,” she said.

The operations unit of Constitutional Protection spent Friday trying to get a handle on the information they had received from Blomkvist. Two of their team had moved into a temporary office at Fridhemsplan, where all the documentation was being assembled. It was inconvenient because the police intranet was at headquarters, which meant that they had to walk back and forth between the two buildings several times a day. Even if it was only a ten-minute walk, it was tiresome. By lunchtime they already had extensive documentation of the fact that both Fredrik Clinton and Hans von Rottinger had been associated with the Security Police in the ’60s and early ’70s.

Von Rottinger came originally from the military intelligence service and worked for several years in the office that coordinated military defence with the Security Police. Clinton’s background was in the air force and he began working for the Personal Protection Unit of the Security Police in 1967.

They had both left S.I.S.: Clinton in 1971 and von Rottinger in 1973. Clinton had gone into business as a management consultant, and von Rottinger had entered the civil service to do investigations for the Swedish Atomic Energy Agency. He was based in London.

It was late afternoon by the time Figuerola was able to convey to Edklinth with some certainty the discovery that Clinton’s and von Rottinger’s careers after they left S.I.S. were falsifications. Clinton’s career was hard to follow. Being a consultant for industry can mean almost anything at all, and a person in that role is under no obligation to report his activities to the government. From his tax returns it was clear that he made good money, but his clients were for the most part corporations with head offices in Switzerland or Liechtenstein, so it was not easy to prove that his work was a fabrication.

Von Rottinger, on the other hand, had never set foot in the office in London where he supposedly worked. In 1973 the office building where he had claimed to be working was in fact torn down and replaced by an extension to King’s Cross Station. No doubt someone made a blunder when the cover story was devised. In the course of the day Figuerola’s team had interviewed a number of people now retired from the Swedish Atomic Energy Agency. Not one of them had heard of Hans von Rottinger.

“Now we know,” Edklinth said. “We just have to discover what it was they really were doing.”

Figuerola said: “What do we do about Blomkvist?”

“In what sense?”

“We promised to give him feedback if we uncovered anything about Clinton and von Rottinger.”

Edklinth thought about it. “He’s going to be digging up that stuff himself if he keeps at it for a while. It’s better that we stay on good terms with him. You can give him what you’ve found. But use your judgement.”

Figuerola promised that she would. They spent a few minutes making arrangements for the weekend. Two of Figuerola’s team were going to keep working. She would be taking the weekend off.

Then she clocked out and went to the gym at St Eriksplan, where she spent two hours driving herself hard to catch up on lost training time. She was home by 7.00. She showered, made a simple dinner, and turned on the T.V. to listen to the news. But then she got restless and put on her running kit. She paused at the front door to think. Bloody Blomkvist. She flipped open her mobile and called his Ericsson.

“We found out a certain amount about von Rottinger and Clinton.”

“Tell me.”

“I will if you come over.”

“Sounds like blackmail,” Blomkvist said.

“I’ve just changed into jogging things to work off a little of my surplus energy,” Figuerola said. “Should I go now or should I wait for you?”

“Would it be O.K. if I came after 9.00?” “That’ll be fine.”

At 8.00 on Friday evening Salander had a visit from Dr Jonasson. He sat in the visitor’s chair and leaned back.

“Are you going to examine me?” Salander said.

“No. Not tonight.”

“O.K.”

“We studied all your notes today and we’ve informed the prosecutor that we’re prepared to discharge you.”

“I understand.”

“They want to take you over to the prison in Göteborg tonight.”

“So soon?”

He nodded. “ Stockholm is making noises. I said I had a number of final tests to run on you tomorrow and that I couldn’t discharge you until Sunday.”

“Why’s that?”

“Don’t know. I was just annoyed they were being so pushy.”

Salander actually smiled. Given a few years she would probably be able to make a good anarchist out of Dr Anders Jonasson. In any case he had a penchant for civil disobedience on a private level.

“Fredrik Clinton,” Blomkvist said, staring at the ceiling above Figuerola’s bed.

“If you light that cigarette I’ll stub it out in your navel,” Figuerola said.

Blomkvist looked in surprise at the cigarette he had extracted from his jacket.

“Sorry,” he said. “Could I borrow your balcony?”

“As long as you brush your teeth afterwards.”

He tied a sheet around his waist. She followed him to the kitchen and filled a large glass with cold water. Then she leaned against the door frame by the balcony.

“Clinton first?”

“If he’s still alive, he’s the link to the past.”

“He’s dying, he needs a new kidney and spends a lot of his time in dialysis or some other treatment.”

“But he’s alive. We should contact him and put the question to him directly. Maybe he’ll talk.”

“No,” Figuerola said. “First of all, this is a preliminary investigation and the police are handling it. In that sense, there is no ‘we’ about it. Second, you’re receiving this information in accordance with your agreement with Edklinth, but you’ve given your word not to take any initiatives that could interfere with the investigation.”

Blomkvist smiled at her. “Ouch,” he said. “The Security Police are pulling on my leash.” He stubbed out his cigarette.

“Mikael, this is not a joke.”

Berger drove to the office on Saturday morning still feeling queasy. She had thought that she was beginning to get to grips with the actual process of producing a newspaper and had planned to reward herself with a weekend off – the first since she started at S.M.P. – but the discovery that her most personal and intimate possessions had been stolen, and the Borgsjö report too, made it impossible for her to relax.

During a sleepless night spent mostly in the kitchen with Linder, Berger had expected the “Poison Pen” to strike, disseminating pictures of her that would be deplorably damaging. What an excellent tool the Internet was for freaks. Good grief… a video of me shagging my husband and another man – I’m going to end up on half the websites in the world.

Panic and terror had dogged her through the night.

It took all of Linder’s powers of persuasion to send her to bed.

At 8.00 she got up and drove to S.M.P. She could not stay away. If a storm was brewing, then she wanted to face it first before anyone else got wind of it.

But in the half-staffed Saturday newsroom everything was normal. People greeted her as she limped past the central desk. Holm was off today. Fredriksson was the acting news editor.

“Morning. I thought you were taking today off,” he said.

“Me too. But I wasn’t feeling well yesterday and I’ve got things I have to do. Anything happening?”

“No, it’s pretty slow today. The hottest thing we’ve got is that the timber industry in Dalarna is reporting a boom, and there was a robbery in Norrköping in which one person was injured.”

“Right. I’ll be in the cage for a while.”

She sat down, leaned her crutches against the bookshelves, and logged on. First she checked her email. She had several messages, but nothing from Poison Pen. She frowned. It had been two days now since the break-in, and he had not yet acted on what had to be a treasure trove of opportunities. Why not? Maybe he’s going to change tactics. Blackmail? Maybe he just wants to keep me guessing.

She had nothing specific to work on, so she clicked on the strategy document she was writing for S.M.P. She stared at the screen for fifteen minutes without seeing the words.

She tried to call Greger, but with no success. She did not even know if his mobile worked in other countries. Of course she could have tracked him down with a bit of effort, but she felt lazy to the core. Wrong, she felt helpless and paralysed.

She tried to call Blomkvist to tell him that the Borgsjö folder had been stolen, but he did not answer.

By 10.00 she had accomplished nothing and decided to go home. She was just reaching out to shut down her computer when her I.C.Q. account pinged. She looked in astonishment at the icon bar. She knew what I.C.Q. was but she seldom chatted, and she had not used the program since starting at S.M.P.

She clicked hesitantly on Answer.

A trick? Poison Pen?

Berger stared at the screen. It took her a few seconds to make the connection. Lisbeth Salander. Impossible.

Berger swallowed. Only four people in the world knew how he had come by that scar. Salander was one of them.

Salander is a devil with computers. But how the hell is she managing to communicate from Sahlgrenska, where she’s been isolated since April?

She doesn’t want the police to know she has access to the Net. Of course not. Which is why she’s chatting with the editor-in-chief of one of the biggest newspapers in Sweden.

Berger’s heart beat furiously.

Berger could not believe she was asking this question. It was absurd. Salander was in rehabilitation at Sahlgrenska and was up to her neck in her own problems. She was the most unlikely person Berger could turn to with any hope of getting help.

Berger thought for while before she replied.

Berger stared at the screen as she tried to work out what Salander was getting at.

Why am I not surprised?

Berger hesitated for ten seconds. Open up S.M.P. to… what? A complete loony? Salander might be innocent of murder, but she was definitely not normal.

But what did she have to lose?

Berger followed the instruction.

It took three minutes.

Berger stared in fascination at the screen as her computer slowly rebooted. She wondered whether she was mad. Then her I.C.Q. pinged.

Figuerola woke at 8.00 on Saturday morning, about two hours later than usual. She sat up in bed and looked at the man beside her. He was snoring. Well, nobody’s perfect.

She wondered where this affair with Blomkvist was going to lead. He was obviously not the faithful type, so no point in looking forward to a long-term relationship. She knew that much from his biography. Anyway, she was not so sure she wanted a stable relationship herself – with a partner and a mortgage and kids. After a dozen failed relationships since her teens, she was tending towards the theory that stability was overrated. Her longest had been with a colleague in Uppsala – they had shared an apartment for two years.

But she was not someone who went in for one-night stands, although she did think that sex was an underrated therapy for just about all ailments. And sex with Blomkvist, out of shape as he was, was just fine. More than just fine, actually. Plus, he was a good person. He made her want more.

A summer romance? A love affair? Was she in love?

She went to the bathroom and washed her face and brushed her teeth. Then she put on her shorts and a thin jacket and quietly left the apartment. She stretched and went on a 45-minute run out past Rålambshov hospital and around Fredhäll and back via Smedsudden. She was home by 9.00 and discovered Blomkvist still asleep. She bent down and bit him on the ear. He opened his eyes in bewilderment.

“Good morning, darling. I need somebody to scrub my back.”

He looked at her and mumbled something.

“What did you say?”

“You don’t need to take a shower. You’re soaked to the skin already.”

“I’ve been running. You should come along.”

“If I tried to go at your pace, I’d have a heart attack on Norr Mälarstrand.”

“Nonsense. Come on, time to get up.”

He scrubbed her back and soaped her shoulders. And her hips. And her stomach. And her breasts. And after a while she had completely lost interest in her shower and pulled him back to bed.

They had their coffee at the pavement café beside Norr Mälarstrand.

“You could turn out to be a bad habit,” she said. “And we’ve only known each other a few days.”

“I find you incredibly attractive. But you know that already.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Sorry, can’t answer that question. I’ve never understood why I’m attracted to one woman and totally uninterested in another.”

She smiled thoughtfully. “I have today off,” she said.

“But not me. I have a mountain of work before the trial begins, and I’ve spent the last three evenings with you instead of getting on with it.”

“What a shame.”

He stood up and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She took hold of his shirtsleeve.

“Blomkvist, I’d like to spend some more time with you.”

“Same here. But it’s going to be a little up and down until we put this story to bed.”

He walked away down Hantverkargatan.

Berger got some coffee and watched the screen. For fifty-three minutes absolutely nothing happened except that her screen saver started up from time to time. Then her I.C.Q. pinged again.

But Salander was gone from her I.C.Q. Berger stared at the screen in frustration. Finally she turned off the computer and went out to find a café where she could sit and think.

CHAPTER 20

Blomkvist spent twenty-five minutes on the tunnelbana changing lines and going in different directions. He finally got off a bus at Slussen, jumped on the Katarina lift up to Mosebacke and took a circuitous route to Fiskargatan 9. He had bought bread, milk and cheese at the mini supermarket next to the County Council building and he put the groceries straight into the fridge. Then he turned on Salander’s computer.

After a moment’s thought he also turned on his Ericsson T10. He ignored his normal mobile because he did not want to talk to anyone who was not involved in the Zalachenko story. He saw that he had missed six calls in the past twenty-four hours: three from Cortez, two from Eriksson, and one from Berger.

First he called Cortez who was in a café in Vasastad and had a few details to discuss, nothing urgent.

Eriksson had only called, she told him, to keep in touch.

Then he called Berger, who was engaged.

He opened the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table] and found the final version of Salander’s autobiographical statement. He smiled, printed out the document and began to read it at once.

Salander switched on her Palm Tungsten T3. She had spent an hour infiltrating and charting the intranet at S.M.P. with the help of Berger’s account. She had not tackled the Peter Fleming account because she did not need to have full administrator rights. What she was interested in was access to S.M.P.’s personnel files. And Berger’s account had complete access to those.

She fervently wished that Blomkvist had been kind enough to smuggle in her PowerBook with a real keyboard and a 17” screen instead of only the hand-held. She downloaded a list of everyone who worked at S.M.P. and began to check them off. There were 223 employees, 82 of whom were women.

She began by crossing off all the women. She did not exclude women on the grounds of their being incapable of such folly, but statistics showed that the absolute majority of people who harassed women were men. That left 141 individuals.

Statistics also argued that the majority of poison pen artists were either teenagers or middle-aged. Since S.M.P. did not have any teenagers on its staff, she drew an age curve and deleted everyone over fifty-five and under twenty-five. That left 103.

She thought for a moment. She did not have much time. Maybe not even twenty-four hours. She made a snap decision. At a stroke she eliminated all employees in distribution, advertising, the picture department, maintenance and I.T. She focused on a group of journalists and editorial staff, forty-eight men between the ages of twenty-six and fifty-four.

Then she heard the rattle of a set of keys. She turned off the Palm and put it under the covers between her thighs. This would be her last Saturday lunch at Sahlgrenska. She took stock of the cabbage stew with resignation. After lunch she would not, she knew, be able to work undisturbed for a while. She put the Palm in the recess behind the bedside table and waited while two Eritrean women vacuumed the room and changed her bedlinen.

One of the women was named Sara. She had regularly smuggled in a few Marlboro Lights for Salander during the past month. She had also given her a lighter, now hidden behind the bedside table. Salander gratefully accepted two cigarettes, which she planned to smoke by the vent window during the night.

Not until 2.00 p.m. was everything quiet again in her room. She took out the Palm and connected to the Net. She had intended to go straight back to S.M.P.’s administration, but she had also to deal with her own problems. She made her daily sweep, starting with the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]. She saw that Blomkvist had not uploaded anything new for three days and wondered what he was working on. The son-of-a-bitch is probably out screwing around with some bimbo with big boobs.

She then proceeded to the Yahoo group [The_Knights] and checked whether Plague had added anything. He had not.

Then she checked the hard drives of Ekström (some routine correspondence about the trial) and Teleborian.

Every time she accessed Teleborian’s hard drive she felt as if her body temperature dropped a few degrees.

She found that he had already written her forensic psychiatric report, even though he was obviously not supposed to write it until after he had been given the opportunity to examine her. He had brushed up his prose, but there was nothing much new. She downloaded the report and sent it off to [Idiotic_Table]. She checked Teleborian’s emails from the past twenty-four hours, clicking through one after another. She almost missed the terse message:

Shit. Jonas. He was mentioned in a lot of correspondence with Teleborian. Used a hotmail account. Not identified.

Salander glanced at the digital clock on her bedside table. 2.28. She immediately pinged Blomkvist’s I.C.Q. No response.

Blomkvist printed out the 220 pages of the manuscript that were finished. Then he shut off the computer and sat down at Salander’s kitchen table with an editing pencil.

He was pleased with the text. But there was still a gigantic gaping hole. How could he find the remainder of the Section? Eriksson might be right: it might be impossible. He was running out of time.

Salander swore in frustration and pinged Plague. He did not answer either. She looked again at the clock. 2.30.

She sat on the edge of the bed and tried Cortez next and then Eriksson. Saturday. Everybody’s off work. 2.32.

Then she tried to reach Berger. No luck. I told her to go home. Shit. 2.33.

She should be able to send a text message to Blomkvist’s mobile… but it was tapped. She tugged her lip.

Finally in desperation she rang for the nurse.

It was 2.35 when she heard the key in the lock and Nurse Agneta looked in on her.

“Hello. Are you O.K.?”

“Is Dr Jonasson on duty?”

“Aren’t you feeling well?”

“I feel fine. But I need to have a few words with him. If possible.”

“I saw him a little while ago. What’s it about?”

“I just have to talk to him.”

Nurse Agneta frowned. Lisbeth Salander had seldom rung for a nurse if she did not have a severe headache or some other equally serious problem. She never pestered them for anything and had never before asked to speak to a specific doctor. But Nurse Agneta had noticed that Dr Jonasson had spent time with the patient who was under arrest and otherwise seemed withdrawn from the world. It was possible that he had established some sort of rapport.

“I’ll find out if he has time,” Nurse Agneta said gently, and closed the door. And then locked it. It was 2.36, and then the clock clicked over to 2.37.

Salander got up from the edge of the bed and went to the window. She kept an eye on the clock. 2.39. 2.40.

At 2.44 she heard steps in the corridor and the rattle of the Securitas guard’s key ring. Jonasson gave her an inquisitive glance and stopped in his tracks when he saw her desperate look.

“Has something happened?”

“Something is happening right now. Have you got a mobile on you?”

“A what?”

“A mobile. I have to make a call.”

Jonasson looked over his shoulder at the door.

“Anders – I need a mobile. Now!”

When he heard the desperation in her voice he dug into his inside pocket and handed her his Motorola. Salander grabbed it from him. She could not call Blomkvist because he had not given her the number of his Ericsson T10. It had never come up, and he had never supposed that she would be able to call him from her isolation. She hesitated a tenth of a second and punched in Berger’s number. It rang three times before Berger answered.

Berger was in her B.M.W. half a mile from home in Saltsjöbaden when her mobile rang.

“Berger.”

“Salander. No time to explain. Have you got the number of Mikael’s second mobile? The one that’s not tapped.”

“Yes.”

Salander had already surprised her once today.

“Call him. Now! Teleborian is meeting Jonas at the Ring in Central Station at 3.00.”

“What’s –”

“Just hurry. Teleborian. Jonas. The Ring in Central Station. 3.00. He has fifteen minutes.”

Salander flipped the mobile shut so that Berger would not be tempted to waste precious seconds with unnecessary questions.

Berger pulled over to the curb. She reached for the address book in her bag and found the number Blomkvist had given her the night they met at Samir’s Cauldron.

Blomkvist heard his mobile beeping. He got up from the kitchen table, went to Salander’s office and picked up the telephone from the desk.

“Yes?”

“Erika.”

“Hi.”

“Teleborian is meeting Jonas at the Ring in Central Station at 3.00. You’ve only got a few minutes.”

“What? What? What?”

“Teleborian –”

“I heard you. How do you know about that?”

“Stop arguing and make it snappy.”

Mikael glanced at the clock. 2.47. “Thanks. Bye.”

He grabbed his laptop case and took the stairs instead of waiting for the lift. As he ran he called Cortez on his T10.

“Cortez.”

“Where are you now?”

“At the Academy bookshop.”

“Teleborian is meeting Jonas at the Ring in Central Station at 3.00. I’m on my way, but you’re closer.”

“Oh, boy. I’m on my way.”

Blomkvist jogged down to Götgatan and sped up towards Slussen. When he reached Slussplan he was badly out of breath. Maybe Figuerola had a point. He was not going to make it. He looked about for a taxi.

Salander handed back the mobile to Dr Jonasson.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Teleborian?” Jonasson could not help overhearing the name.

She met his gaze. “Teleborian is a really, really bad bastard. You have no idea.”

“No, but I could see that something happened just now that got you more agitated than I’ve seen you in all the time you’ve been in my care. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

Salander gave Jonasson a lopsided smile.

“You should have the answer to that question quite soon,” she said.

Cortez left the Academy bookshop running like a madman. He crossed Sveavägen on the viaduct at Mäster Samuelsgatan and went straight down to Klara Norra, where he turned up the Klaraberg viaduct and across Vasagatan. He flew across Klarabergsgatan between a bus and two cars, one of whose drivers punched his windscreen in fury, and through the doors of Central Station as the station clock ticked over to 3.00 sharp.

He took the escalator three steps at a time down to the main ticket hall, and jogged past the Pocket bookshop before slowing down so as not to attract attention. He scanned every face of every person standing or walking near the Ring.

He did not see Teleborian or the man Malm had photographed outside Café Copacabana, whom they believed to be Jonas. He looked back at the clock. 3.01. He was gasping as if he had just run a marathon.

He took a chance and hurried across the hall and out through the doors on to Vasagatan. He stopped and looked about him, checking one face after another, as far as his eyes could see. No Teleborian. No Jonas.

He turned back into the station. 3.03. The Ring area was almost deserted.

Then he looked up and got a split second’s glimpse of Teleborian’s dishevelled profile and goatee as he came out of Pressbyrån on the other side of the ticket hall. A second later the man from Malm’s photograph materialized at Teleborian’s side. Jonas. They crossed the concourse and went out on to Vasagatan by the north door.

Cortez exhaled in relief. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and set off in pursuit of the two men.

Blomkvist’s taxi got to Central Station at 3.07. He walked rapidly into the ticket hall, but he could see neither Teleborian nor anyone looking like they might be Jonas. Nor Cortez for that matter.

He was about to call Cortez when the T10 rang in his hand.

“I’ve got them. They’re sitting in the Tre Remmare pub on Vasagatan by the stairs down to the Akalla line.”

“Thanks, Henry. Where are you?”

“I’m at the bar. Having my afternoon beer. I earned it.”

“Very good. They know what I look like, so I’ll stay out of it. I don’t suppose you have any chance of hearing what they’re saying.”

“Not a hope. I can only see Jonas’ back and that bloody psychoanalyst mumbles when he speaks, so I can’t even see his lips move.”

“I get it.”

“But we may have a problem.”

“What’s that?”

“Jonas has put his wallet and mobile on the table. And he put his car keys on top of the wallet.”

“O.K. I’ll handle it.”

Figuerola’s mobile played out the theme tune from Once Upon a Time in the West. She put down her book about God in antiquity. It did not seem as though she would ever be able to finish it

“Hi. It’s Mikael. What are you up to?”

“I’m sitting at home sorting through my collection of photographs of old lovers. I was ignominiously ditched earlier today.”

“Do you have your car nearby?”

“The last time I checked it was in the parking space outside.”

“Good. Do you feel like an afternoon on the town?”

“Not particularly. What’s going on?”

“A psychiatrist called Teleborian is having a beer with an undercover agent – code name Jonas – down on Vasagatan. And since I’m co-operating with your Stasi-style bureaucracy, I thought you might be amused to tag along.”

Figuerola was on her feet and reaching for her car keys.

“This is not your little joke, is it?”

“Hardly. And Jonas has his car keys on the table in front of him.”

“I’m on my way.”

Eriksson did not answer the telephone, but Blomkvist got lucky and caught Karim, who had been at Åhlens department store buying a birthday present for her husband. He asked her to please – on overtime – hurry over to the pub as back-up for Cortez. Then he called Cortez.

“Here’s the plan. I’ll have a car in place in five minutes. It’ll be on Järnvägsgatan, down the street from the pub. Lottie is going to join you in a few minutes as back-up.”

“Good.”

“When they leave the pub, you tail Jonas. Keep me posted by mobile. As soon as you see him approach a car, we have to know. Lottie will follow Teleborian. If we don’t get there in time, make a note of his registration number.”

“O.K.”

Figuerola parked beside the Nordic Light Hotel next to the Arlanda Express platforms. Blomkvist opened the driver’s door a minute later.

“Which pub are they in?”

Blomkvist told her.

“I have to call for support.”

“I’d rather you didn’t. We’ve got them covered. Too many cooks might wreck the whole dish.”

Figuerola gave him a sceptical look. “And how did you know that this meeting was going to take place?”

“I have to protect my source. Sorry.”

“Do you have your own bloody intelligence service at Millennium?” she burst out.

Blomkvist looked pleased. It was cool to outdo Säpo in their own field of expertise.

In fact he did not have the slightest idea how Berger came to call him out of the blue to tell him of the meeting. She had not had access to ongoing editorial work at Millennium since early April. She knew about Teleborian, to be sure, but Jonas had not come into the picture until May. As far as he knew, Berger had not even known of his existence, let alone that he was the focus of intense speculation both at Säpo and Millennium.

He needed to talk to Berger.

Salander pressed her lips together and looked at the screen of her handheld. After using Jonasson’s mobile, she had pushed all thoughts of the Section to one side and concentrated on Berger’s problem. She had next, after careful consideration, eliminated all the men in the twenty-six to fifty-four age group who were married. She was working with a broad brush, of that she was perfectly aware. The selection was scarcely based on any statistical, sociological or scientific rationale. Poison Pen might easily be a married man with five children and a dog. He might also be a man who worked in maintenance. “He” could even be a woman.

She simply needed to prune the number of names on the list, and her group was now down from forty-eight to eighteen since her latest cut. The list was made up largely of the better-known reporters, managers or middle managers aged thirty-five or older. If she did not find anything of interest in that group, she could always widen the net again.

At 4.00 she logged on to Hacker Republic and uploaded the list to Plague. He pinged her a few minutes later.

She outlined the Poison Pen situation.

Lisbeth Salander thought for a while.

She sent him the access codes for S.M.P.’s newsroom and then logged off from I.C.Q.

It was 4.20 before Cortez called.

“They’re showing signs of leaving.”

“We’re ready.”

Silence.

“They’re going their separate ways outside the pub. Jonas heading north. Teleborian to the south. Lottie’s going after him.”

Blomkvist raised a finger and pointed as Jonas flashed past them on Vasagatan. Figuerola nodded and started the engine. Seconds later Blomkvist could also see Cortez.

“He’s crossing Vasagatan, heading towards Kungsgatan,” Cortez said into his mobile.

“Keep your distance so he doesn’t spot you.”

“Quite a few people out.”

Silence.

“He’s turning north on Kungsgatan.”

“North on Kungsgatan,” Blomkvist said.

Figuerola changed gear and turned up Vasagatan. They were stopped by a red light.

“Where is he now?” Blomkvist said as they turned on to Kungsgatan.

“Opposite P.U.B. department store. He’s walking fast. Whoops, he’s turned up Drottninggatan heading north.”

“Drottninggatan heading north,” Blomkvist said.

“Right,” Figuerola said, making an illegal turn on to Klara Norra and heading towards Olof Palmes Gata. She turned and braked outside the S.I.F. building. Jonas crossed Olof Palmes Gata and turned up towards Sveavägen. Cortez stayed on the other side of the street.

“He turned east –”

“We can see you both.”

“He’s turning down Holländargatan. Hello… Car. Red Audi.”

“Car,” Blomkvist said, writing down the registration number Cortez read off to him.

“Which way is he facing?” Figuerola said.

“Facing south,” Cortez reported. “He’s pulling out in front of you on Olof Palmes Gata… now.”

Monica was already on her way and passing Drottninggatan. She signalled and headed off a couple of pedestrians who tried to sneak across even though their light was red.

“Thanks, Henry. We’ll take him from here.”

The red Audi turned south on Sveavägen. As Figuerola followed she flipped open her mobile with her left hand and punched in a number.

“Could I get an owner of a red Audi?” she said, rattling off the number.

“Jonas Sandberg, born 1971. What did you say? Helsingörsgatan, Kista. Thanks.”

Blomkvist wrote down the information.

They followed the red Audi via Hamngatan to Strandvägen and then straight up to Artillerigatan. Jonas parked a block away from the Armémuseum. He walked across the street and through the front door of an 1890s building.

“Interesting,” Figuerola said, turning to Blomkvist.

Jonas Sandberg had entered a building that was only a block away from the apartment the Prime Minister had borrowed for their private meeting.

“Nicely done,” Figuerola said.

Just then Karim called and told them that Teleborian had gone up on to Klarabergsgatan via the escalators in Central Station and from there to police headquarters on Kungsholmen.

“Police headquarters at 5.00 on a Saturday afternoon?”

Figuerola and Blomkvist exchanged a sceptical look. Monica pondered this turn of events for a few seconds. Then she picked up her mobile and called Criminal Inspector Jan Bublanski.

“Hello, it’s Monica from S.I.S. We met on Norr Mälarstrand a while back.”

“What do you want?” Bublanski said.

“Have you got anybody on duty this weekend?”

“Modig,” Bublanski said.

“I need a favour. Do you know if she’s at headquarters?”

“I doubt it. It’s beautiful weather and Saturday afternoon.”

“Could you possibly reach her or anyone else on the investigative team who might be able to take a look in Prosecutor Ekström’s corridor… to see if there’s a meeting going on in his office at the moment.”

“What sort of meeting?”

“I can’t explain just yet. I just need to know if he has a meeting with anybody right now. And if so, who.”

“You want me to spy on a prosecutor who happens to be my superior?”

Figuerola raised her eyebrows. Then she shrugged. “Yes, I do.”

“I’ll do what I can,” he said and hung up.

Sonja Modig was closer to police headquarters than Bublanski had thought. She was having coffee with her husband on the balcony of a friend’s place in Vasastaden. Their children were away with her parents who had taken them on a week’s holiday, and they planned to do something as old-fashioned as have a bite to eat and go to the movies.

Bublanski explained why he was calling.

“And what sort of excuse would I have to barge in on Ekström?” Modig asked.

“I promised to give him an update on Niedermann yesterday, but in fact I forgot to deliver it to his office before I left. It’s on my desk.”

“O.K.,” said Modig. She looked at her husband and her friend. “I have to go in to H.Q. I’ll take the car and with a little luck I’ll be back in an hour.”

Her husband sighed. Her friend sighed.

“I’m on call this weekend,” Modig said in apology.

She parked on Bergsgatan, took the lift up to Bublanski’s office, and picked up the three A4 pages that comprised the meagre results of their search for Niedermann. Not much to hang on the Christmas tree, she thought.

She took the stairs up to the next floor and stopped at the door to the corridor. Headquarters was almost deserted on this summer afternoon. She was not exactly sneaking around. She was just walking very quietly. She stopped outside Ekström’s closed door. She heard voices and all of a sudden her courage deserted her. She felt a fool. In any normal situation she would have knocked on the door, pushed it open and exclaimed, “Hello! So you’re still here?” and then sailed right in. Now it seemed all wrong.

She looked around.

Why had Bublanski called her? What was this meeting about?

She glanced across the corridor. Opposite Ekström’s office was a conference room big enough for ten people. She had sat through a number of presentations there herself. She went into the room and closed the door. The blinds were down, and the glass partition to the corridor was covered by curtains. It was dark. She pulled up a chair and sat down, then opened the curtains a crack so that she would have a view of the corridor.

She felt uneasy. If anyone opened the door she would have quite a problem explaining what she was doing there. She took out her mobile and looked at the time display. Just before 6.00. She changed the ring to silent and leaned back in her chair, watching the door of Ekström’s office.

At 7.00 Plague pinged Salander.

He sent over a U.R.L.

She logged out and went to the U.R.L. where Plague had uploaded all the administrator rights for S.M.P. She started by checking whether Fleming was online and at work. He was not. So she borrowed his identity and went into S.M.P.’s mail server. That way she could look at all the activity in the email system, even messages that had long since been deleted from individual accounts.

She started with Ernst Teodor Billing, one of the night editors at S.M.P., forty-three years old. She opened his mail and began to click back in time. She spent about two seconds on each message, just long enough to get an idea of who sent it and what it was about. After a few minutes she had worked out what was routine mail in the form of daily memos, schedules and other uninteresting stuff. She started to scroll past these.

She went through three months’ worth of messages one by one. Then she skipped month to month and read only the subject lines, opening the message only if it was something that caught her attention. She learned that Billing was going out with a woman named Sofia and that he used an unpleasant tone with her. She saw that this was nothing unusual, since Billing took an unpleasant tone with most of the people to whom he wrote messages – reporters, layout artists and others. Even so, she thought it odd that a man would consistently address his girlfriend with the words fucking fatty, fucking airhead or fucking cunt.

After an hour of searching, she shut down Billing and crossed him off the list. She moved on to Lars Örjan Wollberg, a veteran reporter at fifty-one who was on the legal desk.

Edklinth walked into police headquarters at 7.30 on Saturday evening. Figuerola and Blomkvist were waiting for him. They were sitting at the same conference table at which Blomkvist had sat the day before.

Edklinth reminded himself that he was on very thin ice and that a host of regulations had been violated when he gave Blomkvist access to the corridor. Figuerola most definitely had no right to invite him here on her own authority. Even the spouses of his colleagues were not permitted in the corridors of S.I.S., but were asked instead to wait on the landings if they were meeting their partner. And to cap it all, Blomkvist was a journalist. From now on Blomkvist would be allowed only into the temporary office at Fridhemsplan.

But outsiders were allowed into the corridors by special invitation. Foreign guests, researchers, academics, freelance consultants… he put Blomkvist into the category of freelance consultant. All this nonsense about security classification was little more than words anyway. Someone decides that a certain person should be given a particular level of clearance. And Edklinth had decided that if criticism were raised, he would say that he personally had given Blomkvist clearance.

If something went wrong, that is. He sat down and looked at Figuerola.

“How did you find out about the meeting?”

“Blomkvist called me at around 4.00,” she said with a satisfied smile.

Edklinth turned to Blomkvist. “And how did you find out about the meeting?”

“Tipped off by a source.”

“Am I to conclude that you’re running some sort of surveillance on Teleborian?”

Figuerola shook her head. “That was my first thought too,” she said in a cheerful voice, as if Blomkvist were not in the room. “But it doesn’t add up. Even if somebody were following Teleborian for Blomkvist, that person could not have known in advance that he was on his way to meet Jonas Sandberg.”

“So… what else? Illegal tapping or something?” Edklinth said.

“I can assure you,” Blomkvist said to remind them that he was there in the room, “that I’m not conducting illegal eavesdropping on anyone. Be realistic. Illegal tapping is the domain of government authorities.”

Edklinth frowned. “So you aren’t going to tell us how you heard about the meeting?”

“I’ve already told you that I won’t. I was tipped off by a source. The source is protected. Why don’t we concentrate on what we’ve discovered?”

“I don’t like loose ends,” Edklinth said. “But O.K. What have you found out?”

“His name is Jonas Sandberg,” Figuerola said. “Trained as a navy frogman and then attended the police academy in the early ’90s. Worked first in Uppsala and then in Södertälje.”

“You’re from Uppsala.”

“Yes, but we missed each other by about a year. He was recruited by S.I.S. Counter-Espionage in 1998. Reassigned to a secret post abroad in 2000. According to our documents, he’s at the embassy in Madrid. I checked with the embassy. They have no record of a Jonas Sandberg on their staff.”

“Just like Mårtensson. Officially moved to a place where he doesn’t exist.”

“The chief of Secretariat is the only person who could make this sort of arrangement.”

“And in normal circumstances everything would be dismissed as muddled red tape. We’ve noticed it only because we’re specifically looking for it. And if anyone starts asking awkward questions, they’ll say it’s confidential or that it has something to do with terrorism.”

“There’s quite a bit of budget work to check up on.”

“The chief of Budget?”

“Maybe.”

“Anything else?”

“Sandberg lives in Sollentuna. He’s not married, but he has a child with a teacher in Södertälje. No black marks on his record. Licence for two handguns. Conscientious and a teetotaller. The only thing that doesn’t quite fit is that he seems to be an evangelical and was a member of the Word of Life in the ’90s.”

“Where did you find that out?”

“I had a word with my old chief in Uppsala. He remembers Sandberg quite well.”

“A Christian frogman with two weapons and offspring in Södertälje. More?”

“We only I.D.’d him about three hours ago. This is pretty fast work, you have to admit.”

“Fair enough. What do we know about the building on Artillerigatan?”

“Not a lot yet. Stefan went to chase someone up from the city building office. We have blueprints of the building. A housing association block since the 1890s. Six floors with a total of twenty-two apartments, plus eight apartments in a small building in the courtyard. I looked up the tenants, but didn’t find anything that stood out. Two of the people living in the building have police records.”

“Who are they?”

“Lindström on the second floor, sixty-three. Convicted of insurance fraud in the ’70s. Wittfelt on the fourth floor, forty-seven. Twice convicted for beating his ex-wife. Otherwise what sounds like a cross-section of middle-class Sweden. There’s one apartment that raises a question mark though.”

“What?”

“It’s on the top floor. Eleven rooms and apparently a bit of a snazzy joint. It’s owned by a company called Bellona Inc.”

“And what’s their stated business?”

“God only knows. They do marketing analyses and have annual sales of around thirty million kronor. All the owners live abroad.”

“Aha.”

“Aha what?”

“Nothing. Just ‘aha’. Do some more checks on Bellona.”

At that moment the officer Blomkvist knew only as Stefan entered the room.

“Hi, chief,” he greeted Edklinth. “This is really cool. I checked out the story behind the Bellona apartment.”

“And?” Figuerola said.

“Bellona Inc. was founded in the ’70s. They bought the apartment from the estate of the former owner, a woman by the name of Kristina Cederholm, born in 1917, married to Hans Wilhelm Francke, the loose cannon who quarrelled with P.G. Vinge at the time S.I.S. was founded.”

“Good,” Edklinth said. “Very good. Monica, we want surveillance on that apartment around the clock. Find out what telephones they have. I want to know who goes in and who comes out, and what vehicles drop anyone off at that address. The usual.”

Edklinth turned to Blomkvist. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but he restrained himself. Blomkvist looked at him expectantly.

“Are you satisfied with the information flow?” Edklinth said at last.

“Very satisfied. Are you satisfied with Millennium’s contribution?”

Edklinth nodded reluctantly. “You do know that I could get into very deep water for this.”

“Not because of me. I regard the information that I receive here as source-protected. I’ll report the facts, but I won’t mention how or where I got them. Before I go to press I’m going to do a formal interview with you. If you don’t want to give me an answer to something, you just say ‘No comment’. Or else you could expound on what you think about the Section for Special Analysis. It’s up to you.”

“Indeed,” Edklinth nodded.

Blomkvist was happy. Within a few hours the Section had taken on tangible form. A real breakthrough.

To Modig’s great frustration the meeting in Ekström’s office was lasting a long time. Mercifully someone had left a full bottle of mineral water on the conference table. She had twice texted her husband to tell him that she was still held up, promising to make it up to him as soon as she could get home. She was starting to get restless and felt like an intruder.

The meeting did not end until 7.30. She was taken completely by surprise when the door opened and Faste came out. And then Dr Teleborian. Behind them came an older, grey-haired man Modig had never seen before. Finally Prosecutor Ekström, putting on a jacket as he switched off the lights and locked the door to his office.

Modig held up her mobile to the gap in the curtains and took two low-res photographs of the group outside Ekström’s door. Seconds later they had set off down the corridor.

She held her breath until they were some distance from the conference room in which she was trapped. She was in a cold sweat by the time she heard the door to the stairwell close. She stood up, weak at the knees.

Bublanski called Figuerola just after 8.00.

“You wanted to know if Ekström had a meeting.”

“Correct,” Figuerola said.

“It just ended. Ekström met with Dr Peter Teleborian and my former colleague Criminal Inspector Faste, and an older gentleman we didn’t recognize.”

“Just a moment,” Figuerola said. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and turned to the others. “Teleborian went straight to Ekström.”

“Hello, are you still there?”

“Sorry. Do we have a description of the third man?”

“Even better. I’m sending you a picture.”

“A picture? I’m in your debt.”

“It would help if you’d tell me what’s going on.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

They sat in silence around the conference table for a moment.

“So,” Edklinth said at last. “Teleborian meets with the Section and then goes directly to see Prosecutor Ekström. I’d give a lot of money to find out what they talked about.”

“Or you could just ask me,” Blomkvist said.

Edklinth and Figuerola looked at him.

“They met to finalize their strategy for nailing Salander at her trial.”

Figuerola gave him a look. Then she nodded slowly.

“That’s a guess,” Edklinth said. “Unless you happen to have paranormal abilities.”

“It’s no guess,” said Mikael. “They met to discuss the forensic psychiatric report on Salander. Teleborian has just finished writing it.”

“Nonsense. Salander hasn’t even been examined.”

Blomkvist shrugged and opened his laptop case. “That hasn’t stopped Teleborian in the past. Here’s the latest version. It’s dated, as you can see, the week the trial is scheduled to begin.”

Edklinth and Figuerola read through at the text before them. At last they exchanged glances and then looked at Blomkvist.

“And where the devil did you get hold of this?” Edklinth said.

“That’s from a source I have to protect,” said Blomkvist.

“Blomkvist… we have to be able to trust each other. You’re withholding information. Have you got any more surprises up your sleeve?”

“Yes. I do have secrets, of course. Just as I’m persuaded that you haven’t given me carte blanche to look at everything you have here at Säpo.”

“It’s not the same thing.”

“It’s precisely the same thing. This arrangement involves cooperation. You said it yourself: we have to trust each other. I’m not holding back anything that could be useful to your investigation of the Section or throw light on the various crimes that have been committed. I’ve already handed over evidence that Teleborian committed crimes with Björck in 1991, and I told you that he would be hired to do the same thing again now. And this is the document that proves me right.”

“But you’re still withholding key material.”

“Naturally, and you can either suspend our co-operation or you can live with that.”

Figuerola held up a diplomatic finger. “Excuse me, but does this mean that Ekström is working for the Section?”

Blomkvist frowned. “That I don’t know. My sense is that he’s more a useful fool being used by the Section. He’s ambitious, but I think he’s honest, if a little stupid. One source did tell me that he swallowed most of what Teleborian fed him about Salander at a presentation of reports when the hunt for her was still on.”

“So you don’t think it takes much to manipulate him?”

“Exactly. And Criminal Inspector Faste is an unadulterated idiot who believes that Salander is a lesbian Satanist.”

Berger was at home. She felt paralysed and unable to concentrate on any real work. All the time she expected someone to call and tell her that pictures of her were posted on some website.

She caught herself thinking over and over about Salander, although she realized that her hopes of getting help from her were most likely in vain. Salander was locked up at Sahlgrenska. She was not allowed visitors and could not even read the newspapers. But she was an oddly resourceful young woman. Despite her isolation she had managed to contact Berger on I.C.Q. and then by telephone. And two years ago she had single-handedly destroyed Wennerström’s financial empire and saved Millennium.

At 8.00 Linder arrived and knocked on the door. Berger jumped as though someone had fired a shot in her living room.

“Hello, Erika. You’re sitting here in the dark looking glum.”

Berger nodded and turned on a light. “Hi. I’ll put on some coffee –”

“No. Let me do it. Anything new?”

You can say that again. Lisbeth Salander got in touch with me and took control of my computer. And then she called to say that Teleborian and somebody called Jonas were meeting at Central Station this afternoon.

“No. Nothing new,” she said. “But I have something I’d like to try on you.”

“Try it.”

“What do you think the chances are that this isn’t a stalker but somebody I know who wants to fuck with me?”

“What’s the difference?”

“To me a stalker is someone I don’t know who’s become fixated on me. The alternative is a person who wants to take some sort of revenge and sabotage my life for personal reasons.”

“Interesting thought. Why did this come up?”

“I was… discussing the situation with someone today. I can’t give you her name, but she suggested that threats from a real stalker would be different. She said a stalker would never have written the email to the girl on the culture desk. It seems completely beside the point.”

Linder said: “There is something to that. You know, I never read the emails. Could I see them?”

Berger set up her laptop on the kitchen table.

Figuerola escorted Blomkvist out of police headquarters at 10.00 p.m. They stopped at the same place in Kronoberg park as the day before.

“Here we are again. Are you going to disappear to work or do you want to come to my place and come to bed with me?”

“Well…”

“You don’t have to feel pressured, Mikael. If you have to work, then do it.”

“Listen, Figuerola, you’re worryingly habit-forming.”

“And you don’t want to be dependent on anything. Is that what you’re saying?”

“No. That’s not what I’m saying. But there’s someone I have to talk to tonight and it’ll take a while. You’ll be asleep before I’m done.”

She shrugged.

“See you.”

He kissed her cheek and headed for the bus stop on Fridhemsplan.

“Blomkvist,” she called.

“What?”

“I’m free tomorrow morning as well. Come and have breakfast if you can make it.”

CHAPTER 21

Salander picked up a number of ominous vibrations as she browsed the emails of the news editor, Holm. He was fifty-eight and thus fell outside the group, but Salander had included him anyway because he and Berger had been at each other’s throats. He was a schemer who wrote messages to various people telling them how someone had done a rotten job.

It was obvious to Salander that Holm did not like Berger, and he certainly wasted a lot of space talking about how the bitch had said this or done that. He used the Net exclusively for work-related sites. If he had other interests, he must google them in his own time on some other machine.

She kept him as a candidate for the title of Poison Pen, but he was not a favourite. Salander spent some time thinking about why she did not believe he was the one, and arrived at the conclusion that he was so damned arrogant he did not have to go to the trouble of using anonymous email. If he wanted to call Berger a whore, he would do it openly. And he did not seem the type to go sneaking into Berger’s home in the middle of the night.

At 10.00 in the evening she took a break and went into [Idiotic_Table]. She saw that Blomkvist had not come back yet. She felt slightly peeved and wondered what he was up to, and whether he had made it in time to Teleborian’s meeting.

Then she went back into S.M.P.’s server.

She moved to the next name on the list, assistant sports editor Claes Lundin, twenty-nine. She had just opened his email when she stopped and bit her lip. She closed it again and went instead to Berger’s.

She scrolled back in time. There was relatively little in her inbox, since her email account had been opened only on May 2. The very first message was a midday memo from Peter Fredriksson. In the course of Berger’s first day several people had emailed her to welcome her to S.M.P.

Salander carefully read each message in Berger’s inbox. She could see how even from day one there had been a hostile undertone in her correspondence with Holm. They seemed unable to agree on anything, and Salander saw that Holm was already trying to exasperate Berger by sending several emails about complete trivialities.

She skipped over ads, spam and news memos. She focused on any kind of personal correspondence. She read budget calculations, advertising and marketing projections, an exchange with C.F.O. Sellberg that went on for a week and was virtually a brawl over staff layoffs. Berger had received irritated messages from the head of the legal department about some temp. by the name of Johannes Frisk. She had apparently detailed him to work on some story and this had not been appreciated. Apart from the first welcome emails, it seemed as if no-one at management level could see anything positive in any of Berger’s arguments or proposals.

After a while Salander scrolled back to the beginning and did a statistical calculation in her head. Of all the upper-level managers at S.M.P., only four did not engage in sniping. They were the chairman of the board Magnus Borgsjö, assistant editor Fredriksson, front-page editor Magnusson, and culture editor Sebastian Strandlund.

Had they never heard of women at S.M.P.? All the heads of department were men.

Of these, the one that Berger had least to do with was Strandlund. She had exchanged only two emails with the culture editor. The friendliest and most engaging messages came from front-page editor Gunnar Magnusson. Borgsjö’s were terse and to the point.

Why the hell had this group of boys hired Berger at all, if all they did was tear her limb from limb?

The colleague Berger seemed to have the most to do with was Fredriksson. His role was to act as a kind of shadow, to sit in on her meetings as an observer. He prepared memos, briefed Berger on various articles and issues, and got the jobs moving.

He emailed Berger a dozen times a day.

Salander sorted all of Fredriksson’s emails to Berger and read them through. In a number of instances he had objected to some decision Berger had made and presented counter-proposals. Berger seemed to have confidence in him since she would then often change her decision or accept his argument. He was never hostile. But there was not a hint of any personal relationship to her.

Salander closed Berger’s email and thought for a moment.

She opened Fredriksson’s account.

Plague had been fooling around with the home computers of various employees of S.M.P. all evening without much success. He had managed to get into Holm’s machine because it had an open line to his desk at work; any time of the day or night he could go in and access whatever he was working on. Holm’s P.C. was one of the most boring Plague had ever hacked. He had no luck with the other eighteen names on Salander’s list. One reason was that none of the people he tried to hack was online on a Saturday night. He was beginning to tire of this impossible task when Salander pinged him at 10.30.

Plague sighed. This girl who had once been his student now had a better handle on things than he did.

Blomkvist was back at Salander’s apartment on Mosebacke just before midnight. He was tired. He took a shower and put on some coffee, and then he booted up Salander’s computer and pinged her I.C.Q.

Mikael nodded to himself.

Linder woke with a start when her earpiece beeped. Someone had just tripped the motion detector she had placed in the hall on the ground floor. She propped herself up on her elbow. It was 5.23 on Sunday morning. She slipped silently out of bed and pulled on her jeans, a T-shirt and trainers. She stuffed the Mace in her back pocket and picked up her spring-loaded baton.

She passed the door to Berger’s bedroom without a sound, noticing that it was closed and therefore locked.

She stopped at the top of the stairs and listened. She heard a faint clinking sound and movement from the ground floor. Slowly she went down the stairs and paused in the hall to listen again.

A chair scraped in the kitchen. She held the baton in a firm grip and crept to the kitchen door. She saw a bald, unshaven man sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice, reading S.M.P. He sensed her presence and looked up.

“And who the hell are you?”

Linder relaxed and leaned against the door jamb. “Greger Beckman, I presume. Hello. I’m Susanne Linder.”

“I see. Are you going to hit me over the head or would you like a glass of juice?”

“Yes, please,” Linder said, putting down her baton. “Juice, that is.”

Beckman reached for a glass from the draining board and poured some for her.

“I work for Milton Security,” Linder said. “I think it’s probably best if your wife explains what I’m doing here.”

Beckman stood up. “Has something happened to Erika?”

“Your wife is fine. But there’s been some trouble. We tried to get hold of you in Paris.”

“Paris? Why Paris? I’ve been in Helsinki, for God’s sake.”

“Alright. I’m sorry, but your wife thought you were in Paris.”

“That’s next month,” said Beckman on his way out of the door.

“The bedroom is locked. You need a code to open the door,” Linder said.

“I beg your pardon… what code?”

She told him the three numbers he had to punch in to open the bedroom door. He ran up the stairs.

At 10.00 on Sunday morning Jonasson came into Salander’s room.

“Hello, Lisbeth.”

“Hello.”

“Just thought I’d warn you: the police are coming at lunchtime.”

“Fine.”

“You don’t seem worried.”

“I’m not.”

“I have a present for you.”

“A present? What for?”

“You’ve been one of my most interesting patients in a long time.”

“You don’t say,” Salander said sceptically.

“I heard that you’re fascinated by D.N.A. and genetics.”

“Who’s been gossiping? That psychologist lady, I bet.”

Jonasson nodded. “If you get bored in prison… this is the latest thing on D.N.A. research.”

He handed her a brick of a book entitled Spirals – Mysteries of DNA, by Professor Yoshito Takamura of Tokyo University. Salander opened it and studied the table of contents.

“Beautiful,” she said.

“Someday I’d be interested to hear how it is that you can read academic texts that even I can’t understand.”

As soon as Jonasson had left the room, she took out her Palm. Last chance. From S.M.P.’s personnel department Salander had learned that Fredriksson had worked at the paper for six years. During that time he had been off sick for two extended periods: two months in 2003 and three months in 2004. From the personnel files she concluded that the reason in both instances was burnout. Berger’s predecessor Morander had on one occasion questioned whether Fredriksson should indeed stay on as assistant editor.

Yak, yak, yak. Nothing concrete to go on.

At 11.45 Plague pinged her.

Salander logged off from I.C.Q. She glanced at the clock and realized that it would soon be lunchtime. She rapidly composed a message that she addressed to the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]:

The instant she sent the message she heard movement in the corridor. She polished the screen of her Palm Tungsten T3 and then switched it off and placed it in the recess behind the bedside table.

“Hello, Lisbeth.” It was Giannini in the doorway.

“Hello.”

“The police are coming for you in a while. I’ve brought you some clothes. I hope they’re the right size.”

Salander looked distrustfully at the selection of neat, dark-coloured linen trousers and pastel-coloured blouses.

Two uniformed Göteborg policewomen came to get her. Giannini was to go with them to the prison.

As they walked from her room down the corridor, Salander noticed that several of the staff were watching her with curiosity. She gave them a friendly nod, and some of them waved back. As if by chance, Jonasson was standing by the reception desk. They looked at each other and nodded. Even before they had turned the corner Salander noticed that he was heading for her room.

During the entire procedure of transporting her to the prison, Salander did not say a word to the police.

Blomkvist had closed his iBook at 7.00 on Sunday morning. He sat for a moment at Salander’s desk listless, staring into space.

Then he went to her bedroom and looked at her gigantic, king-size bed. After a while he went back to her office and flipped open his mobile to call Figuerola.

“Hi. It’s Mikael.”

“Hello there. Are you already up?”

“I’ve just finished working and I’m on my way to bed. I just wanted to call and say hello.”

“Men who just want to call and say hello generally have ulterior motives.”

He laughed.

“Blomkvist… you could come here and sleep if you like.”

“I’d be wretched company.”

“I’ll get used to it.”

He took a taxi to Pontonjärgatan.

Berger spent Sunday in bed with her husband. They lay there talking and dozing. In the afternoon they got dressed and went for a walk down to the steamship dock.

“S.M.P. was a mistake,” Berger said when they got home.

“Don’t say that. Right now it’s tough, but you knew it would be. Things will calm down after you’ve been there a while.”

“It’s not the job. I can handle that. It’s the atmosphere.”

“I see.”

“I don’t like it there, but on the other hand I can’t walk out after a few weeks.”

She sat at the kitchen table and stared morosely into space. Beckman had never seen his wife so stymied.

Inspector Faste met Salander for the first time at 11.30 on Sunday morning when a woman police officer brought her into Erlander’s office at Göteborg police headquarters.

“You were difficult enough to catch,” Faste said.

Salander gave him a long look, satisfied herself that he was an idiot, and decided that she would not waste too many seconds concerning herself with his existence.

“Inspector Gunilla Wäring will accompany you to Stockholm,” Erlander said.

“Alright,” Faste said. “Then we’ll leave at once. There are quite a few people who want to have a serious talk with you, Salander.”

Erlander said goodbye to her. She ignored him.

They had decided for simplicity’s sake to do the prisoner transfer to Stockholm by car. Wäring drove. At the start of the journey Hans Faste sat in the front passenger seat with his head turned towards the back as he tried to have some exchange with Salander. By the time they reached Alingsås his neck was aching and he gave up.

Salander looked at the countryside. In her mind Faste did not exist.

Teleborian was right. She’s fucking retarded, Faste thought. We’ll see about changing that attitude when we get to Stockholm.

Every so often he glanced at Salander and tried to form an opinion of the woman he had been desperate to track down for such a long time. Even he had some doubts when he saw the skinny girl. He wondered how much she could weigh. He reminded himself that she was a lesbian and consequently not a real woman.

But it was possible that the bit about Satanism was an exaggeration. She did not look the type.

The irony was that he would have preferred to arrest her for the three murders that she was originally suspected of, but reality had caught up with his investigation. Even a skinny girl can handle a weapon. Instead she had been taken in for assaulting the top leadership of Svavelsjö M.C., and she was guilty of that crime, no question. There was forensic evidence related to the incident which she no doubt intended to refute.

Figuerola woke Blomkvist at 1.00 in the afternoon. She had been sitting on her balcony and had finished reading her book about the idea of God in antiquity, listening all the while to Blomkvist’s snores from the bedroom. It had been peaceful. When she went in to look at him it came to her, acutely, that she was more attracted to him than she had been to any other man in years.

It was a pleasant yet unsettling feeling. There he was, but he was not a stable element in her life.

They went down to Norr Mälarstrand for a coffee. Then she took him home and to bed for the rest of the afternoon. He left her at 7.00. She felt a vague sense of loss a moment after he kissed her cheek and was gone.

At 8.00 on Sunday evening Linder knocked on Berger’s door. She would not be sleeping there now that Beckman was home, and this visit was not connected with her job. But during the time she had spent at Berger’s house they had both grown to enjoy the long conversations they had in the kitchen. She had discovered a great liking for Berger. She recognized in her a desperate woman who succeeded in concealing her true nature. She went to work apparently calm, but in reality she was a bundle of nerves.

Linder suspected that her anxiety was due not solely to Poison Pen. But Berger’s life and problems were none of her business. It was a friendly visit. She had come out here just to see Berger and to be sure that everything was alright. The couple were in the kitchen in a solemn mood. It seemed as though they had spent their Sunday working their way through one or two serious issues.

Beckman put on some coffee. Linder had been there only a few minutes when Berger’s mobile rang.

Berger had answered every call that day with a feeling of impending doom.

“Berger,” she said.

“Hello, Ricky.”

Blomkvist. Shit. I haven’t told him the Borgsjö file has disappeared.

“Hi, Micke.”

“Salander was moved to the prison in Göteborg this evening, to wait for transport to Stockholm tomorrow.”

“O.K.”

“She sent you a… well, a message.”

“Oh?”

“It’s pretty cryptic.”

“What did she say?”

“She says: ‘Poison Pen is Peter Fredriksson.’”

Erika sat for ten seconds in silence while thoughts rushed through her head. Impossible. Peter isn’t like that. Salander has to be wrong.

“Was that all?”

“That’s the whole message. Do you know what it’s about?”

“Yes.”

“Ricky… what are you and that girl up to? She rang you to tip me off about Teleborian and –”

“Thanks, Micke. We’ll talk later.”

She turned off her mobile and looked at Linder with an expression of absolute astonishment.

“Tell me,” Linder said.

Linder was in two minds. Berger had been told that her assistant editor was the one sending the vicious emails. She talked non-stop. Then Linder had asked her how she knew Fredriksson was her stalker. Then Berger was silent. Linder noticed her eyes and saw that something had changed in her attitude. She was all of a sudden totally confused.

“I can’t tell you…”

“What do you mean you can’t tell me?”

“Susanne, I just know that Fredriksson is responsible. But I can’t tell you how I got that information. What can I do?”

“If I’m going to help you, you have to tell me.”

“I… I can’t. You don’t understand.”

Berger got up and stood at the kitchen window with her back to Linder. Finally she turned.

“I’m going to his house.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’re not going anywhere, least of all to the home of somebody who obviously hates you.”

Berger looked torn.

“Sit down. Tell me what happened. It was Blomkvist calling you, right?”

Berger nodded.

“I… today I asked a hacker to go through the home computers of the staff.”

“Aha. So you’ve probably by extension committed a serious computer crime. And you don’t want to tell me who your hacker is?”

“I promised I would never tell anyone… Other people are involved. Something that Mikael is working on.”

“Does Blomkvist know about the emails and the break-in here?”

“No, he was just passing on a message.”

Linder cocked her head to one side, and all of a sudden a chain of associations formed in her mind.

Erika Berger. Mikael Blomkvist. Millennium. Rogue policemen who broke in and bugged Blomkvist’s apartment. Linder watching the watchers. Blomkvist working like a madman on a story about Lisbeth Salander.

The fact that Salander was a wizard at computers was widely known at Milton Security. No-one knew how she had come by her skills, and Linder had never heard any rumours that Salander might be a hacker. But Armansky had once said something about Salander delivering quite incredible reports when she was doing personal investigations. A hacker…

But Salander is under guard on a ward in Göteborg.

It was absurd.

“Is it Salander we’re talking about?” Linder said.

Berger looked as though she had touched a live wire.

“I can’t discuss where the information came from. Not one word.”

Linder laughed aloud.

It was Salander. Berger’s confirmation of it could not have been clearer. She was completely off balance.

Yet it’s impossible.

Under guard as she was, Salander had nevertheless taken on the job of finding out who Poison Pen was. Sheer madness.

Linder thought hard.

She could not understand the whole Salander story. She had met her maybe five times during the years she had worked at Milton Security and had never had so much as a single conversation with her. She regarded Salander as a sullen and asocial individual with a skin like a rhino. She had heard that Armansky himself had taken Salander on and since she respected Armansky she assumed that he had good reason for his endless patience towards the sullen girl.

Poison Pen is Peter Fredriksson.

Could she be right? What was the proof?

Linder then spent a long time questioning Erika on everything she knew about Fredriksson, what his role was at S.M.P., and how their relationship had been. The answers did not help her at all.

Berger had displayed a frustrating indecision. She had wavered between a determination to drive out to Fredriksson’s place and confront him, and an unwillingness to believe that it could really be true. Finally Linder convinced her that she could not storm into Fredriksson’s apartment and launch into an accusation – if he was innocent, she would make an utter fool of herself.

So Linder had promised to look into the matter. It was a promise she regretted as soon as she made it, because she did not have the faintest idea how she was going to proceed.

She parked her Fiat Strada as close to Fredriksson’s apartment building in Fisksätra as she could. She locked the car and looked about her. She was not sure what she was going to do, but she supposed she would have to knock on his door and somehow get him to answer a number of questions. She was acutely aware that this was a job that lay well outside her remit at Milton, and she knew Armansky would be furious if he found out what she was doing.

It was not a good plan, and in any case it fell apart before she had managed to put it into practice. She had reached the courtyard and was approaching Fredriksson’s apartment when the door opened. Linder recognized him at once from the photograph in his personnel file which she had studied on Berger’s computer. She kept walking and they passed each other. He disappeared in the direction of the garage. It was just before 11.00 and Fredriksson was on his way somewhere. Linder turned and ran back to her car.

Blomkvist sat for a long time looking at his mobile after Berger hung up. He wondered what was going on. In frustration he looked at Salander’s computer. By now she had been moved to the prison in Göteborg, and he had no chance of asking her anything.

He opened his Ericsson T10 and called Idris Ghidi in Angered.

“Hello. Mikael Blomkvist.”

“Hello,” Ghidi said.

“Just to tell you that you can stop that job you were doing for me.”

Ghidi had already worked out that Blomkvist would call since Salander had been taken from the hospital.

“I understand,” he said.

“You can keep the mobile as we agreed. I’ll send you the final payment this week.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m the one who should thank you for your help.”

Blomkvist opened his iBook. The events of the past twenty-four hours meant that a significant part of the manuscript had to be revised and that in all probability a whole new section would have to be added.

He sighed and got to work.

At 11.15 Fredriksson parked three streets away from Berger’s house. Linder had already guessed where he was going and had stopped trying to keep him in sight. She drove past his car fully two minutes after he parked. The car was empty. She went on a short distance past Berger’s house and stopped well out of sight. Her palms were sweating.

She opened her tin of Catch Dry snuff and tucked a teenage-sized portion inside her upper lip.

Then she opened her car door and looked around. As soon as she could tell that Fredriksson was on his way to Saltsjöbaden, she knew that Salander’s information must be correct. And obviously he had not come all this way for fun. Trouble was brewing. Which was fine by her, so long as she could catch him red-handed.

She took her telescopic baton from the side pocket of her car door and weighed it in her hand for a moment. She pressed the lock in the handle and out shot a heavy, spring-loaded steel cable. She clenched her teeth.

That was why she had left the Södermalm force.

She had had one mad outbreak of rage when for the third time in as many days the squad car had driven to an address in Hägersten after the same woman had called the police and screamed for help because her husband had abused her. And just as on the first two occasions, the situation had resolved itself before they arrived.

They had detained the husband on the staircase while the woman was questioned. No, she did not want to file a police report. No, it was all a mistake. No, he was fine… it was actually all her fault. She had provoked him…

And the whole time the bastard had stood there grinning, looking Linder straight in the eye.

She could not explain why she did it. But suddenly something had snapped in her, and she took out her baton and slammed it across his face. The first blow had lacked power. She had only given him a fat lip and forced him on to his knees. In the next ten seconds – until her colleagues grabbed her and half dragged, half carried her out of the halfway – she had let the blows rain down on his back, kidneys, hips and shoulders.

Charges were never filed. She had resigned the same evening and went home and cried for a week. Then she pulled herself together and went to see Dragan Armansky. She explained what she had done and why she had left the force. She was looking for a job. Armansky had been sceptical and said he would need some time to think it over. She had given up hope by the time he called six weeks later and told her he was ready to take her on trial.

Linder frowned and stuck the baton into her belt at the small of her back. She checked that she had the Mace canister in her right-hand pocket and that the laces of her trainers were securely tied. She walked back to Berger’s house and slipped into the garden.

She knew that the outside motion detector had not yet been installed, and she moved soundlessly across the lawn, along the hedge at the border of the property. She could not see him. She went around the house and stood still. Then she spotted him as a shadow in the darkness near Beckman’s studio.

He can’t know how stupid it is for him to come back here.

He was squatting down, trying to see through a gap in a curtain in the room next to the living room. Then he moved up on to the veranda and looked through the cracks in the drawn blinds at the big picture window.

Linder suddenly smiled.

She crossed the lawn to the corner of the house while he still had his back to her. She crouched behind some currant bushes by the gable end and waited. She could see him through the branches. From his position Fredriksson would be able to look down the hall and into part of the kitchen. Apparently he had found something interesting to look at, and it was ten minutes before he moved again. This time he came closer to Linder.

As he rounded the corner and passed her, she stood up and spoke in a low voice:

“Hello there, Fredriksson.”

He stopped short and spun towards her.

She saw his eyes glistening in the dark. She could not see his expression, but she could hear that he was holding his breath and she could sense his shock.

“We can do this the easy way or we can do it the hard way,” she said. “We’re going to walk to your car and –”

He turned and made to run away.

Linder raised her baton and directed a devastatingly painful blow to his left kneecap.

He fell with a moan.

She raised the baton a second time, but then caught herself. She thought she could feel Armansky’s eyes on the back of her neck.

She bent down, flipped him over on to his stomach and put her knee in the small of his back. She took hold of his right hand and twisted it round on to his back and handcuffed him. He was frail and he put up no resistance.

Berger turned off the lamp in the living room and limped upstairs. She no longer needed the crutches, but the sole of her foot still hurt when she put any weight on it. Beckman turned off the light in the kitchen and followed his wife upstairs. He had never before seen her so unhappy. Nothing he said could soothe her or alleviate the anxiety she was feeling.

She got undressed, crept into bed and turned her back to him.

“It’s not your fault, Greger,” she said when she heard him get in beside her.

“You’re not well,” he said. “I want you to stay at home for a few days.”

He put an arm around her shoulders. She did not to push him away, but she was completely passive. He bent over, kissed her cautiously on the neck, and held her.

“There’s nothing you can say or do to make the situation any better. I know I need to take a break. I feel as though I’ve climbed on to an express train and discovered that I’m on the wrong track.”

“We could go sailing for a few days. Get away from it all.”

“No. I can’t get away from it all.”

She turned to him. “The worst thing I could do now would be to run away. I have to sort things out first. Then we can go.”

“O.K,” Beckman said. “I’m not being much help.”

She smiled wanly. “No, you’re not. But thanks for being here. I love you insanely – you know that.”

He mumbled something inaudible.

“I simply can’t believe it’s Fredriksson,” Berger said. “I’ve never felt the least bit of hostility from him.”

Linder was just wondering whether she should ring Berger’s doorbell when she saw the lights go off on the ground floor. She looked down at Fredriksson. He had not said a word. He was quite still. She thought for a long time before she made up her mind.

She bent down and grabbed the handcuffs, pulled him to his feet, and leaned him against the wall.

“Can you stand by yourself?” she said.

He did not answer.

“Right, we’ll make this easy. You struggle in any way and you’ll get the same treatment on your right leg. You struggle even more and I’ll break your arms. Do you understand?”

She could hear him breathing heavily. Fear?

She pushed him along in front of her out on to the street all the way to his car. He was limping badly so she held him up. Just as they reached the car they met a man out walking his dog. The man stopped and looked at Fredriksson in his handcuffs.

“This is a police matter,” Linder said in a firm voice. “You go home.” The man turned and walked away in the direction he had come.

She put Fredriksson in the back seat and drove him home to Fisksätra. It was 12.30 and they saw no-one as they walked into his building. Linder fished out his keys and followed him up the stairs to his apartment on the fourth floor.

“You can’t go into my apartment,” said Fredriksson.

It was the first thing he had said since she cuffed him. She opened the apartment door and shoved him inside.

“You have no right. You have to have a search warrant –”

“I’m not a police officer,” she said in a low voice.

He stared at her suspiciously.

She took hold of his shirt and dragged him into the living room, pushing him down on to a sofa. He had a neatly kept two-bedroom apartment. Bedroom to the left of the living room, kitchen across the hall, a small office off the living room.

She looked in the office and heaved a sigh of relief. The smoking gun. Straightaway she saw photographs from Berger’s album spread out on a desk next to a computer. He had pinned up thirty or so pictures on the wall behind the computer. She regarded the exhibition with raised eyebrows. Berger was a fine-looking woman. And her sex life was more active than Linder’s own.

She heard Fredriksson moving and went back to the living room, rapped him once across his lower back and then dragged him into the office and sat him down on the floor.

“You stay there,” she said.

She went into the kitchen and found a paper carrier bag from Konsum. She took down one picture after another and then found the stripped album and Berger’s diaries.

“Where’s the video?” she said.

Fredriksson did not answer. Linder went into the living room and turned on the T.V. There was a tape in the V.C.R., but it took a while before she found the video channel on the remote so she could check it. She popped out the video and looked around to ensure he had not made any copies.

She found Berger’s teenage love letters and the Borgsjö folder. Then she turned her attentions to Fredriksson’s computer. She saw that he had a Microtek scanner hooked up to his P.C., and when she lifted the lid she found a photograph of Berger at a Club Xtreme party, New Year’s Eve 1986 according to a banner on the wall.

She booted up the computer and discovered that it was password-protected.

“What’s your password,” she asked.

Fredriksson sat obstinately silent and refused to answer.

Linder suddenly felt utterly calm. She knew that technically she had committed one crime after another this evening, including unlawful restraint and even aggravated kidnapping. She did not care. On the contrary, she felt almost exhilarated.

After a while she shrugged and dug in her pocket for her Swiss Army knife. She unplugged all the cables from the computer, turned it round and used the screwdriver to open the back. It took her fifteen minutes to take it apart and remove the hard drive.

She had taken everything, but for safety’s sake she did a thorough search of the desk drawers, the stacks of paper and the shelves. Suddenly her gaze fell on an old school yearbook lying on the windowsill. She saw that it was from Djurholm Gymnasium 1978. Did Berger not come from Djurholm’s upper class? She opened the yearbook and began to look through that year’s school leavers.

She found Erika Berger, eighteen years old, with student cap and a sunny smile with dimples. She wore a thin, white cotton dress and held a bouquet of flowers in her hand. She looked the epitome of an innocent teenager with top grades.

Linder almost missed the connection, but there it was on the next page. She would never have recognized him but for the caption. Peter Fredriksson. He was in a different class from Berger. Linder studied the photograph of a thin boy in a student cap who looked into the camera with a serious expression.

Her eyes met Fredriksson’s.

“Even then she was a whore.”

“Fascinating,” Linder said.

“She fucked every guy in the school.”

“I doubt that.”

“She was a fucking –”

“Don’t say it. So what happened? Couldn’t you get into her knickers?”

“She treated me as though I didn’t exist. She laughed at me. And when she started at S.M.P. she didn’t even recognize me.”

“Right,” said Linder wearily. “I’m sure you had a terrible childhood. How about we have a serious talk?”

“What do you want?”

“I’m not a police officer,” Linder said. “I’m someone who takes care of people like you.”

She paused and let his imagination do the work.

“I want to know if you put photographs of her anywhere on the Internet.”

He shook his head.

“Are you quite sure about that?”

He nodded.

“Berger will have to decide for herself whether she wants to make a formal complaint against you for harassment, threats, and breaking and entering, or whether she wants to settle things amicably.”

He said nothing.

“If she decides to ignore you – and I think that’s about what you’re worth – then I’ll be keeping an eye on you.”

She held up her baton.

“If you ever go near her house again, or send her email or otherwise molest her, I’ll be back. I’ll beat you so hard so that even your own mother won’t recognize you. Do I make myself clear?”

Still he said nothing.

“So you have the opportunity to influence how this story ends. Are you interested?”

He nodded slowly.

“In that case, I’m going to recommend to Fru Berger that she lets you off, but don’t think about coming into work again. As of right now you’re fired.”

He nodded.

“You will disappear from her life and move out of Stockholm. I don’t give a shit what you do with your life or where you end up. Find a job in Göteborg or Malmö. Go on sick leave again. Do whatever you like. But leave Berger in peace. Are we agreed?”

Fredriksson began to sob.

“I didn’t mean any harm,” he said. “I just wanted –”

“You just wanted to make her life a living hell and you certainly succeeded. Do I or do I not have your word?”

He nodded.

She bent over, turned him on to his stomach and unlocked the handcuffs. She took the Konsum bag containing Berger’s life and left him there on the floor.

It was 2.30 a.m. on Monday when Linder left Fredriksson’s building. She considered letting the matter rest until the next day, but then it occurred to her that if she had been the one involved, she would have wanted to know straightaway. Besides, her car was still parked out in Saltsjöbaden. She called a taxi.

Beckman opened the door even before she managed to ring the bell. He was wearing jeans and did not look as if he had just got out of bed.

“Is Erika awake?” Linder asked.

He nodded.

“Has something else happened?” he said.

She smiled at him.

“Come in. We’re just talking in the kitchen.”

They went in.

“Hello, Erika,” Linder said. “You need to learn to get some sleep once in a while.”

“What’s happened?”

Linder held out the Konsum bag.

“Fredriksson promises to leave you alone from now on. God knows if we can trust him, but if he keeps his word it’ll be less painful than hassling with a police report and a trial. It’s up to you.”

“So it was him?”

Linder nodded. Beckman poured a coffee, but she did not want one. She had drunk much too much coffee over the past few days. She sat down and told them what had happened outside their house that night.

Berger sat in silence for a moment. Then she went upstairs, and came back with her copy of the school yearbook. She looked at Fredriksson’s face for a long time.

“I do remember him,” she said at last. “But I had no idea it was the same Peter Fredriksson. I wouldn’t even have remembered his name if it weren’t written here.”

“What happened?” Linder asked.

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He was a quiet and totally uninteresting boy in another class. I think we might have had some subjects together. French, if I remember correctly.”

“He said that you treated him as though he didn’t exist.”

“I probably did. He wasn’t somebody I knew and he wasn’t in our group.”

“I know how cliques work. Did you bully him or anything like that?”

“No… no, for God’s sake. I hated bullying. We had campaigns against bullying in the school, and I was president of the student council. I don’t remember that he ever spoke to me.”

“O.K,” Linder said. “But he obviously had a grudge against you. He was off sick for two long periods, suffering from stress and overwork. Maybe there were other reasons for his being off sick that we don’t know about.”

She got up and put on her leather jacket.

“I’ve got his hard drive. Technically it’s stolen goods so I shouldn’t leave it with you. You don’t have to worry – I’ll destroy it as soon as I get home.”

“Wait, Susanne. How can I ever thank you?”

“Well, you can back me up when Armansky’s wrath hits me like a bolt of lightning.”

Berger gave her a concerned look.

“Will you get into trouble for this?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

“Can we pay you for –”

“No. But Armansky may bill you for tonight. I hope he does, because that would mean he approves of what I did and probably won’t decide to fire me.”

“I’ll make sure he sends us a bill.”

Berger stood up and gave Linder a long hug.

“Thanks, Susanne. If you ever need a friend, you’ve got one in me. If there’s anything I can do for you…”

“Thanks. Don’t leave those pictures lying around. And while we’re on the subject, Milton could install a much better safe for you.”

Berger smiled as Beckman walked Linder back to her car.

CHAPTER 22

Berger woke up at 6.00 on Monday morning. She had not slept for more than an hour, but she felt strangely rested. She supposed that it was a physical reaction of some sort. For the first time in several months she put on her jogging things and went for a furious and excruciatingly painful sprint down to the steamboat wharf. But after a hundred metres or so her heel hurt so much that she had to slow down and go on at a more leisurely pace, relishing the pain in her foot with each step she took.

She felt reborn. It was as though the Grim Reaper had passed by her door and at the last moment changed his mind and moved on to the next house. She could still not take in how fortunate she was that Fredriksson had had her pictures in his possession for four days and done nothing with them. The scanning he had done indicated that he had something planned, but he had simply not got around to whatever it was.

She decided to give Susanne Linder a very expensive Christmas present this year. She would think of something really special.

She left her husband asleep and at 7.30 drove to S.M.P.’s office at Norrtull. She parked in the garage, took the lift to the newsroom, and settled down in the glass cage. Before she did anything else, she called someone from maintenance.

“Peter Fredriksson has left the paper. He won’t be back,” she said. “Please bring as many boxes as you need to empty his desk of personal items and have them delivered to his apartment this morning.”

She looked over towards the news desk. Holm had just arrived. He met her gaze and nodded to her.

She nodded back.

Holm was a bloody-minded bastard, but after their altercation a few weeks earlier he had stopped trying to cause trouble. If he continued to show the same positive attitude, he might possibly survive as news editor. Possibly.

She should, she felt, be able to turn things around.

At 8.45 she saw Borgsjö come out of the lift and disappear up the internal staircase to his office on the floor above. I have to talk to him today.

She got some coffee and spent a while on the morning memo. It looked like it was going to be a slow news day. The only item of interest was an agency report, to the effect that Lisbeth Salander had been moved to the prison in Stockholm the day before. She O.K.’d the story and forwarded it to Holm.

At 8.59 Borgsjö called.

“Berger, come up to my office right away.” He hung up.

He was white in the face when Berger found him at his desk. He stood up and slammed a thick wad of papers on to his desk.

“What the hell is this?” he roared.

Berger’s heart sank like a stone. She only had to glance at the cover to see what Borgsjö had found in the morning post.

Fredriksson hadn’t managed to do anything with her photographs. But he had posted Cortez’s article and research to Borgsjö.

Calmly she sat down opposite him.

“That’s an article written by a reporter called Henry Cortez. Millennium had planned to run it in last week’s issue.”

Borgsjö looked desperate.

“How the hell do you dare? I brought you into S.M.P. and the first thing you do is to start digging up dirt. What kind of a media whore are you?”

Berger’s eyes narrowed. She turned ice-cold. She had had enough of the word “whore”.

“Do you really think anyone is going to care about this? Do you think you can trap me with this crap? And why the hell did you send it to me anonymously?”

“That’s not what happened, Magnus.”

“Then tell me what did happen.”

“The person who sent that article to you anonymously was Fredriksson. He was fired from S.M.P. yesterday.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“It’s a long story. But I’ve had a copy of the article for more than two weeks, trying to work out a way of raising the subject with you.”

“You’re behind this article?”

“No, I am not. Cortez researched and wrote the article entirely off his own bat. I didn’t know anything about it.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“As soon as my old colleagues at Millennium saw how you were implicated in the story, Blomkvist stopped its publication. He called me and gave me a copy, out of concern for my position. It was then stolen from me, and now it’s ended up with you. Millennium wanted me to have a chance to talk with you before they printed it. Which they mean to do in the August issue.”

“I’ve never met a more unscrupulous media whore in my whole life. It defies belief.”

“Now that you’ve read the story, perhaps you have also considered the research behind it. Cortez has a cast-iron story. You know that.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“If you’re still here when Millennium goes to press, that will hurt S.M.P. I’ve worried myself sick and tried to find a way out… but there isn’t one.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll have to go.”

“Don’t be absurd. I haven’t done anything illegal.”

“Magnus, don’t you understand the impact of this exposé? I don’t want to have to call a board meeting. It would be too embarrassing.”

“You’re not going to call anything at all. You’re finished at S.M.P.”

“Wrong. Only the board can sack me. Presumably you’re allowed to call them in for an extraordinary meeting. I would suggest you do that for this afternoon.”

Borgsjö came round the desk and stood so close to Berger that she could feel his breath.

“Berger, you have one chance to survive this. You have to go to your damned colleagues at Millennium and get them to kill this story. If you do a good job I might even forget what you’ve done.”

Berger sighed.

“Magnus, you aren’t understanding how serious this is. I have no influence whatsoever on what Millennium is going to publish. This story is going to come out no matter what I say. The only thing I care about is how it affects S.M.P. That’s why you have to resign.”

Borgsjö put his hands on the back of her chair.

“Berger, your cronies at Millennium might change their minds if they knew that you would be fired the instant they leak this bullshit.”

He straightened up.

“I’ll be at a meeting in Norrköping today.” He looked at her, furious and arrogant. “At Svea Construction.”

“I see.”

“When I’m back tomorrow you will report to me that this matter has been taken care of. Understood?”

He put on his jacket. Berger watched him with her eyes half closed.

“Maybe then you’ll survive at S.M.P. Now get out of my office.”

She went back to the glass cage and sat quite still in her chair for twenty minutes. Then she picked up the telephone and asked Holm to come to her office. This time he was there within a minute.

“Sit down.”

Holm raised an eyebrow and sat down.

“What did I do wrong this time?” he said sarcastically.

“Anders, this is my last day at S.M.P. I’m resigning here and now. I’m calling in the deputy chairman and as many of the board as I can find for a meeting over lunch.”

He stared at her with undisguised shock.

“I’m going to recommend that you be made acting editor-in-chief.”

“What?”

“Are you O.K. with that?”

Holm leaned back in his chair and looked at her.

“I’ve never wanted to be editor-in-chief,” he said.

“I know that. But you’re tough enough to do the job. And you’ll walk over corpses to be able to publish a good story. I just wish you had more common sense.”

“So what happened?”

“I have a different style to you. You and I have always argued about what angle to take, and we’ll never agree.”

“No,” he said. “We never will. But it’s possible that my style is old-fashioned.”

“I don’t know if old-fashioned is the right word. You’re a very good newspaperman, but you behave like a bastard. That’s totally unnecessary. But what we were most at odds about was that you claimed that as news editor you couldn’t allow personal considerations to affect how the news was assessed.”

Berger suddenly gave Holm a sly smile. She opened her bag and took out her original text of the Borgsjö story.

“Let’s test your sense of news assessment. I have a story here that came to us from a reporter at Millennium. This morning I’m thinking that we should run this article as today’s top story.” She tossed the folder into Holm’s lap. “You’re the news editor. I’d be interested to hear whether you share my assessment.”

Holm opened the folder and began to read. Even the introduction made his eyes widen. He sat up straight in his chair and stared at Berger. Then he lowered his eyes and read through the article to the end. He studied the source material for ten more minutes before he slowly put the folder aside.

“This is going to cause one hell of an uproar.”

“I know. That’s why I’m leaving. Millennium was planning to run the story in their July issue, but Mikael Blomkvist stopped publication. He gave me the article so that I could talk with Borgsjö before they run it.”

“And?”

“Borgsjö ordered me to suppress it.”

“I see. So you’re planning to run it in S.M.P. out of spite?”

“Not out of spite, no. There’s no other way. If S.M.P. runs the story, we have a chance of getting out of this mess with our honour intact. Borgsjö has no choice but to go. But it also means that I can’t stay here any longer.”

Holm sat in silence for two minutes.

“Damn it, Berger… I didn’t think you were that tough. I never thought I’d ever say this, but if you’re that thick-skinned, I’m actually sorry you’re leaving.”

“You could stop publication, but if both you and I O.K. it… Do you think you’ll run the story?”

“Too right we’ll run it. It would leak anyway.”

“Exactly.”

Holm got up and stood uncertainly by her desk.

“Get to work,” said Berger.

After Holm left her office she waited five minutes before she picked up the telephone and rang Eriksson.

“Hello, Malin. Is Henry there?”

“Yes, he’s at his desk.”

“Could you call him into your office and put on the speakerphone? We have to have a conference.”

Cortez was there within fifteen seconds.

“What’s up?”

“Henry, I did something immoral today.”

“Oh, you did?”

“I gave your story about Vitavara to the news editor here at S.M.P.”

“You what?”

“I told him to run the story in S.M.P. tomorrow. Your byline. And you’ll be paid, of course. In fact, you can name your price.”

“Erika… what the hell is going on?”

She gave him a brisk summary of what had happened during the last weeks, and how Fredriksson had almost destroyed her.

“Jesus Christ,” Cortez said.

“I know that this is your story, Henry. But equally I have no choice. Can you agree to this?”

Cortez was silent for a long while.

“Thanks for asking.” he said. “It’s O.K. to run the story with my byline. If it’s O.K. with Malin, I should say.”

“It’s O.K. with me,” Eriksson said.

“Thank you both,” Berger said. “Can you tell Mikael? I don’t suppose he’s in yet.”

“I’ll talk to Mikael,” Eriksson said. “But Erika, does this mean that you’re out of work from today?”

Berger laughed. “I’ve decided to take the rest of the year off. Believe me, a few weeks at S.M.P. was enough.”

“I don’t think you ought to start thinking in terms of a holiday yet,” Eriksson said.

“Why not?”

“Could you come here this afternoon?”

“What for?”

“I need help. If you want to come back to being editor-in-chief here, you could start tomorrow morning.”

“Malin, you’re the editor-in-chief. Anything else is out of the question.”

“Then you could start as assistant editor,” Eriksson laughed.

“Are you serious?”

“Oh, Erika, I miss you so much that I’m ready to die. One reason I took the job here was so that I’d have a chance to work with you. And now you’re somewhere else.”

Berger said nothing for a minute. She had not even thought about the possibility of making a comeback at Millennium.

“Do you think I’d really be welcome?” she said hesitantly.

“What do you think? I reckon we’d begin with a huge celebration which I would arrange myself. And you’d be back just in time for us to publish you-know-what.”

Berger checked the clock on her desk. 10.55. In a couple of hours her whole world had been turned upside down. She realized what a longing she had to walk up the stairs at Millennium again.

“I have a few things to take care of here over the next few hours. Is it O.K. if I pop in at around 4.00?”

Linder looked Armansky directly in the eye as she told him exactly what had happened during the night. The only thing she left out was her sudden intuition that the hacking of Fredriksson’s computer had something to do with Salander. She kept that to herself for two reasons. First, she thought it sounded too implausible. Second, she knew that Armansky was somehow up to his neck in the Salander affair along with Blomkvist.

Armansky listened intently. When Linder finished her account, he said: “Beckman called about an hour ago.”

“Oh?”

“He and Berger are coming in later this week to sign a contract. He wants to thank us for what Milton has done and above all for what you have done.”

“I see. It’s nice to have a satisfied client.”

“He also wants to order a safe for the house. We’ll install it and finish up the alarm package before this weekend.”

“That’s good.”

“He says he wants us to invoice him for your work over the weekend. That’ll make it quite a sizable bill we’ll be sending them.” Armansky sighed. “Susanne, you do know that Fredriksson could go to the police and get you into very deep water on a number of counts.”

She nodded.

“Mind you, he’d end up in prison so fast it would make his head spin, but he might think it was worth it.”

“I doubt he has the balls to go to the police.”

“You may be right, but what you did far exceeded instructions.”

“I know.”

“So how do you think I should react?”

“Only you can decide that.”

“How did you think I would to react?”

“What I think has nothing to do with it. You could always sack me.”

“Hardly. I can’t afford to lose a professional of your calibre.”

“Thanks.”

“But if you do anything like this again, I’m going to get very angry.”

Linder nodded.

“What did you do with the hard drive?”

“It’s destroyed. I put it in a vice this morning and crushed it.”

“Then we can forget about all this.”

Berger spent the rest of the morning calling the board members of S.M.P. She reached the deputy chairman at his summer house near Vaxholm and persuaded him to drive to the city as quickly as he could. A rather makeshift board assembled over lunch. Berger began by explaining how the Cortez folder had come to her, and what consequences it had already had.

When she finished it was proposed, as she had anticipated, that they try to find another solution. Berger told them that S.M.P. was going to run the story the next day. She also told them that this would be her last day of work and that her decision was final.

She got the board to approve two decisions and enter them in the minutes. Magnus Borgsjö would be asked to vacate his position as chairman, effective immediately, and Anders Holm would be appointed acting editor-in-chief. Then she excused herself and left the board members to discuss the situation among themselves.

At 2.00 she went down to the personnel department and had a contract drawn up. Then she went to speak to Sebastian Strandlund, the culture editor, and the reporter Eva Karlsson.

“As far as I can tell, you consider Eva to be a talented reporter.”

“That’s true,” said Strandlund.

“And in your budget requests over the past two years you’ve asked that your staff be increased by at least two.”

“Correct.”

“Eva, in view of the email to which you were subjected, there might be ugly rumours if I were to hire you full-time. But are you still interested?”

“Of course.”

“In that case my last act here at S.M.P. will be to sign this employment contract.”

“Your last act?”

“It’s a long story. I’m leaving today. Could you two be so kind as to keep quiet about it for an hour or so?”

“What…”

“There’ll be a memo coming around soon.”

Berger signed the contract and pushed it across the desk towards Karlsson.

“Good luck,” she said, smiling.

“The older man who participated in the meeting with Ekström on Saturday is Georg Nyström, a police superintendent,” Figuerola said as she put the surveillance photographs from Modig’s mobile on Edklinth’s desk.

“Superintendent,” Edklinth muttered.

“Stefan identified him last night. He went to the apartment on Artillerigatan.”

“What do we know about him?”

“He comes from the regular police and has worked for S.I.S. since 1983. Since 1996 he’s been serving as an investigator with his own area of responsibility. He does internal checks and examines cases that S.I.S. has completed.”

“O.K.”

“Since Saturday morning six persons of interest have been to the building. Besides Sandberg and Nyström, Clinton is definitely operating from there. This morning he was taken by ambulance to have dialysis.”

“Who are the other three?”

“A man named Otto Hallberg. He was in S.I.S. in the ’80s but he’s actually connected to the Defence General Staff. He works for the navy and the military intelligence service.”

“I see. Why am I not surprised?”

Figuerola laid down one more photograph. “This man we haven’t identified yet. He went to lunch with Hallberg. We’ll have to see if we can get a better picture when he goes home tonight. But the most interesting one is this man.” She laid another photograph on the desk.

“I recognize him,” Edklinth said.

“His name is Wadensjöö.”

“Precisely. He worked on the terrorist detail around fifteen years ago. A desk man. He was one of the candidates for the post of top boss here at the Firm. I don’t know what became of him.”

“He resigned in 1991. Guess who he had lunch with an hour or so ago.”

She put her last photograph on the desk.

“Chief of Secretariat Shenke and Chief of Budget Gustav Atterbom. I want to have surveillance on these gentlemen around the clock. I want to know exactly who they meet.”

“That’s not practical,” Edklinth said. “I have only four men available.”

Edklinth pinched his lower lip as he thought. Then he looked up at Figuerola.

“We need more people,” he said. “Do you think you could reach Inspector Bublanski discreetly and ask him if he might like to have dinner with me today? Around 7.00, say?”

Edklinth then reached for his telephone and dialled a number from memory.

“Hello, Armansky. It’s Edklinth. Might I reciprocate for that wonderful dinner? No, I insist. Shall we say 7.00?”

Salander had spent the night in Kronoberg prison in a two-by-four-metre cell. The furnishings were pretty basic, but she had fallen asleep within minutes of the key being turned in the lock. Early on Monday morning she was up and obediently doing the stretching exercises prescribed for her by the physio at Sahlgrenska. Breakfast was then brought to her, and she sat on her cot and stared into space.

At 9.30 she was led to an interrogation cell at the end of the corridor. The guard was a short, bald, old man with a round face and hornrimmed glasses. He was polite and cheerful.

Giannini greeted her affectionately. Salander ignored Faste. She was meeting Prosecutor Ekström for the first time, and she spent the next half hour sitting on a chair staring stonily at a spot on the wall just above Ekström’s head. She said nothing and she did not move a muscle.

At 10.00 Ekström broke off the fruitless interrogation. He was annoyed not to be able to get the slightest response out of her. For the first time he felt uncertain as he observed the thin, doll-like young woman. How was it possible that she could have beaten up those two thugs Lundin and Nieminen in Stallarholmen? Would the court really believe that story, even if he did have convincing evidence?

Salander was brought a simple lunch at noon and spent the next hour solving equations in her head. She focused on an area of spherical astronomy from a book she had read two years earlier.

At 2.30 she was led back to the interrogation cell. This time her guard was a young woman. Salander sat on a chair in the empty cell and pondered a particularly intricate equation.

After ten minutes the door opened.

“Hello, Lisbeth.” A friendly tone. It was Teleborian.

He smiled at her, and she froze. The components of the equation she had constructed in the air before her came tumbling to the ground. She could hear the numbers and mathematical symbols bouncing and clattering as if they had physical form.

Teleborian stood still for a minute and looked at her before he sat down on the other side of the table. She continued to stare at the same spot on the wall.

After a while she met his eyes.

“I’m sorry that you’ve ended up in this situation,” Teleborian said. “I’m going to try to help you in every way I can. I hope we can establish some level of mutual trust.”

Salander examined every inch of him. The dishevelled hair. The beard. The little gap between his front teeth. The thin lips. The brand-new brown jacket. The shirt open at the neck. She listened to his smooth and treacherously friendly voice.

“I also hope that I can be of more help to you than the last time we met.”

He placed a small notebook and pen on the table. Salander lowered her eyes and looked at the pen. It was a pointed, silver-coloured tube.

Risk assessment.

She suppressed an impulse to reach out and grab the pen.

Her eyes sought the little finger of his left hand. She saw a faint white mark where fifteen years earlier she had sunk in her teeth and locked her jaws so hard that she almost bit his finger off. It had taken three guards to hold her down and prise open her jaws.

I was a scared little girl barely into my teens then. Now I’m a grown woman. I can kill you whenever I want.

Again she fixed her eyes on the spot on the wall, and gathered up the scattered numbers and symbols and began to reassemble the equation.

Teleborian studied Salander with a neutral expression. He had not become an internationally respected psychiatrist for nothing. He had a gift for reading emotions and moods. He could sense a cold shadow passing through the room, and interpreted this as a sign that the patient felt fear and shame beneath her imperturbable exterior. He assumed that she was reacting to his presence, and was pleased that her attitude towards him had not changed over the years. She’s going to hang herself in the district court.

Berger’s final act at S.M.P. was to write a memo to the staff. To begin with her mood was angry, and she filled two pages explaining why she was resigning, including her opinion of various colleagues. Then she deleted the whole text and started again in a calmer tone.

She did not refer to Fredriksson. If she had done, all interest would have focused on him, and her real reasons would be drowned out by the sensation a case of sexual harassment would inevitably cause.

She gave two reasons. The principal one was that she had met implacable resistance from management to her proposal that managers and owners should reduce their salaries and bonuses. Which meant that she would have had to start her tenure at S.M.P. with damaging cutbacks in staff. This was not only a breach of the promise she had been given when she accepted the job, but it would undercut her every attempt to bring about long-term change in order to strengthen the newspaper.

The second reason she gave was the revelation about Borgsjö. She wrote that she had been instructed to cover up the story, and this flew in the face of all she believed to be her job. It meant that she had no choice but to resign her position as editor. She concluded by saying that S.M.P.’s dire situation was not a personnel problem, but a management problem.

She read through the memo, corrected the typos, and emailed it to all the paper’s employees. She sent a copy to Pressens Tidning, a media journal, and also to the trade magazine Journalisten. Then she packed away her laptop and went to see Holm at his desk.

“Goodbye,” she said.

“Goodbye, Berger. It was hellish working with you.”

They smiled at each other.

“One last thing,” she said.

“Tell me?”

“Frisk has been working on a story I commissioned.”

“Right, and nobody has any idea what it’s about.”

“Give him some support. He’s come a long way, and I’ll be staying in touch with him. Let him finish the job. I guarantee you’ll be pleased with the result.”

He looked wary. Then he nodded.

They did not shake hands. She left her card key on his desk and took the lift down to the garage. She parked her B.M.W. near the Millennium offices at a little after 4.00.