The Girl who played with Fire

CHAPTER 4

Salander landed at Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport at noon. In addition to the flying time, she had spent nine hours at Grantley Adams Airport on Barbados. British Airways had refused to let the aircraft take off until a passenger who looked vaguely Arabic had been taken away for questioning and a possible terrorist threat had been snuffed out. By the time she landed at Gatwick in London, she had missed her connecting flight to Sweden and had had to wait overnight before she could be rebooked.

Salander felt like a bag of bananas that had been left too long in the sun. All she had with her was a carry-on bag containing her PowerBook, Dimensions, and a change of clothes. She passed unchecked through the green gate at Customs. When she got outside to the airport shuttle buses she was welcomed home by a blast of freezing sleet.

She hesitated. All her life she had had to choose the cheapest option, and she was not yet used to the idea that she had more than three billion kronor, which she had stolen by means of an Internet coup combined with good old-fashioned fraud. After a few moments of getting cold and wet, she said to hell with the rule book and waved for a taxi. She gave the driver her address on Lundagatan and fell asleep in the backseat.

It was not until the taxi drew up on Lundagatan and the driver shook her awake that she realized she had given him her old address. She told him she had changed her mind and asked him to continue on to Götgatsbacken. She gave him a big tip in dollars and swore as she stepped into a puddle in the gutter. She was dressed in jeans, T-shirt, and a thin cloth jacket. She wore sandals and short cotton socks. She walked gingerly over to the 7-Eleven, where she bought some shampoo, toothpaste, soap, kefir, milk, cheese, eggs, bread, frozen cinnamon rolls, coffee, Lipton’s tea bags, a jar of pickles, apples, a large package of Billy’s Pan Pizza, and a pack of Marlboro Lights. She paid with a Visa card.

When she came back out on the street she hesitated about which way to go. She could walk up Svartensgatan or down Hökens Gata towards Slussen. The drawback with Hökens Gata was that then she would have to walk right past the door of the Millennium offices, running the risk of bumping into Blomkvist. In the end she decided not to go out of her way to avoid him. She walked towards Slussen, although it was a bit longer that way, and turned off to the right by way of Hökens Gata up to Mosebacke Torg. She cut across the square past the statue of the Sisters in front of Södra Theatre and took the steps up the hill to Fiskargatan. She stopped and looked up at the apartment building pensively. It did not really feel like “home.”

She looked around. It was an out-of-the-way spot in the middle of Södermalm Island. There was no through traffic, which was fine with her. It was easy to observe who was moving about the area. It was apparently popular with walkers in the summertime, but in the winter the only ones there were those who had business in the neighbourhood. There was hardly a soul to be seen now – certainly not anyone she recognized, or who might reasonably be expected to recognize her. Salander set down her shopping bag in the slush to dig out her keys. She took the elevator to the top floor and unlocked the door with the nameplate V. KULLA.

One of the first things Salander had done after she came into a very large sum of money and thereby became financially independent for the rest of her life (or for as long as three billion kronor could be expected to last) was to look around for an apartment. The property market had been a new experience for her. She had never before invested money in anything more substantial than occasional useful items which she could either pay for with cash or buy on a reasonable payment plan. The biggest outlays had previously been various computers and her lightweight Kawasaki motorcycle. She had bought the bike for 7,000 kronor – a real bargain. She had spent about as much on spare parts and devoted several months to taking the motorcycle apart and overhauling it. She had wanted a car, but she had been wary of buying one, since she did not know how she would have fit it into her budget.

Buying an apartment, she realized, was a deal of a different order. She had started by reading the classified ads in the online edition of Dagens Nyheter, which was a science all to itself, she discovered:

1 bdrm + living/dining, fantastic loc. nr Södra Station, 2.7m kr or highest bid. S/ch 5510 p/m.

3 rms + kitchen, park view, Högalid, 2.9m kr.

2? rms, 47 sq. m., renov. bath, new plumbing 1998. Gotlandsgat. 1.8m kr. S/ch 2200 p/m.

She had telephoned some of the numbers haphazardly, but she had no idea what questions to ask. Soon she felt so idiotic that she stopped even trying. Instead she went out on the first Sunday in January and visited two apartment open houses. One was on Vindragarvägen way out on Reimersholme, and the other on Heleneborgsgatan near Hornstull. The apartment on Reimers was a bright four-room place in a tower block with a view of Långholmen and Essingen. There she could be content. The apartment on Heleneborgsgatan was a dump with a view of the building next door.

The problem was that she could not decide which part of town she wanted to live in, how her apartment should look, or what sort of questions she should be asking of her new home. She had never thought about an alternative to the 500 square feet on Lundagatan, where she had spent her childhood. Through her trustee at the time, the lawyer Holger Palmgren, she had been granted possession of the apartment when she turned eighteen. She plopped down on the lumpy sofa in her combination office/living room and began to think.

The apartment on Lundagatan looked into a courtyard. It was cramped and not the least bit comfortable. The view from her bedroom was a firewall on a gable facade. The view from the kitchen was of the back of the building facing the street and the entrance to the basement storage area. She could see a streetlight from her living room, and a few branches of a birch tree.

The first requirement of her new home was that it should have some sort of view.

She did not have a balcony, and had always envied well-to-do neighbours higher up in the building who spent warm days with a cold beer under an awning on theirs. The second requirement was that her new home would have to have a balcony.

What should the apartment look like? She thought about Blomkvist’s apartment – 700 square feet in one open space in a converted loft on Bellmansgatan with views of City Hall and the locks at Slussen. She had liked it there. She wanted to have a pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment that was easy to take care of. That was a third point on her list of requirements.

For years she had lived in cramped spaces. Her kitchen was a mere 100 square feet, with room for only a tiny table and two chairs. Her living room was 200 square feet. The bedroom was a 120. Her fourth requirement was that the new apartment should have plenty of space and closets. She wanted to have a proper office and a big bedroom where she could spread herself out.

Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor, an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted a washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window.

Then she studied the offerings of estate agents online. The next morning she got up early to visit Nobel Estates, the company that, according to some, had the best reputation in Stockholm. She was dressed in old black jeans, boots, and her black leather jacket. She stood at a counter and watched a blond woman of about thirty-five, who had just logged on to the Nobel Estates website and was uploading photographs of apartments. At length a short, plump, middle-aged man with thin red hair came over. She asked him what sort of apartments he had available. He looked up at her in surprise and then assumed an avuncular tone:

“Well, young lady, do your parents know that you’re thinking of moving away from home?”

Salander gave him a stone-cold glare until he stopped chuckling.

“I want an apartment,” she said.

He cleared his throat and glanced appealingly at his colleague on the computer.

“I see. And what kind of apartment did you have in mind?”

“I think I’d like an apartment in Söder, with a balcony and a view of the water, at least four rooms, a bathroom with a window, and a utility room. And there has to be a lockable area where I can keep a motorcycle.”

The woman at the computer looked up and stared at Salander.

“A motorcycle?” the thin-haired man said.

Salander nodded.

“May I know… uh, your name?”

Salander told him. She asked him for his name and he introduced himself as Joakim Persson.

“The thing is, it’s rather expensive to purchase a cooperative apartment here in Stockholm…”

Salander did not reply. She had asked him what sort of apartments he had to offer; the information that it cost money was irrelevant.

“What line of work are you in?”

Salander thought for a moment. Technically she was a freelancer; in practice she worked only for Armansky and Milton Security, but that had been somewhat irregular over the past year. She had not done any work for him in three months.

“I’m not working at anything at the moment,” she said.

“Well then… I presume you’re still at school.”

“No, I’m not at school.”

Persson came around the counter and put his arm kindly around Salander’s shoulders, escorting her towards the door.

“Well, you see, Ms. Salander, we’d be happy to welcome you back in a few years’ time, but you’d have to bring along a little more money than what’s in your piggy bank. The fact is that a weekly allowance won’t really cover this.” He pinched her good-naturedly on the cheek. “So drop in again, and we’ll see about finding you a little pad.”

Salander stood on the street outside Nobel Estates for several minutes. She wondered absentmindedly what little Master Persson would think if a Molotov cocktail came flying through his display window. Then she went home and booted up her PowerBook.

It took her ten minutes to hack into Nobel Estates’ internal computer network using the passwords she happened to notice the woman behind the counter type in before she started uploading photographs. It took three minutes to find out that the computer the woman was working on was in fact also the company’s Net server – how dim can you get? – and another three minutes to gain access to all fourteen computers on the network. After about two hours she had gone through Persson’s records and discovered that there were some 750,000 kronor in under-the-table income that he had not reported to the tax authorities over the past two years.

She downloaded all the necessary files and emailed them to the tax authorities from an anonymous email account on a server in the USA. Then she put Master Persson out of her mind.

She spent the rest of the day going through Nobel Estates’ listed properties. The most expensive one was a small palace outside Mariefred, where she had no desire to live. Out of sheer perversity she chose the next most expensive, a huge apartment just off Mosebacke Torg.

She scrutinized the photographs and floor plan, and in the end decided that it more than fulfilled her requirements. It had previously been owned by a director of the Asea Brown Boveri power company, who slipped into obscurity after he got himself a much-discussed and much-criticized golden parachute of several billion kronor.

That evening she telephoned Jeremy MacMillan, partner in the law firm MacMillan&Marks in Gibraltar. She had done business with MacMillan before. For a fee even he thought generous he had set up P.O. box companies to be owners of the accounts that administered the fortune she had stolen a year ago from the corrupt financier Hans-Erik Wennerström.

She engaged MacMillan’s services again, instructing him to open negotiations with Nobel Estates on behalf of Wasp Enterprises to buy the apartment on Fiskargatan near Mosebacke Torg. It took four days, and the figure finally arrived at made her raise her eyebrows. Plus the 5 percent commission to MacMillan. Before the week was out she had moved in with two boxes of clothes and bed linens, a mattress, and some kitchen utensils. She slept on the mattress in the apartment for three weeks while she investigated clinics for plastic surgery, straightened out a number of unresolved bureaucratic details (including a nighttime talk with a certain lawyer, Nils Bjurman), and paid in advance for the rent at her old place, as well as the electricity bills and other monthly expenses.

Then she had booked her journey to the clinic in Italy. When the treatments were done and she was discharged, she sat in a hotel room in Rome and thought about what to do next. She should have returned to Sweden to get on with her life, but for various reasons she could not bear to think about Stockholm.

She had no real profession. She could see for herself no future at Milton Security. It was not Armansky’s fault. In all probability, he would have liked her to work full-time and turn herself into an efficient cog in the company machine, but at the age of twenty-five she lacked the education, and she had no wish to find herself pushing fifty and still plodding away doing investigations of crooks in the corporate world. It was an amusing hobby – not a lifetime career.

Another reason she was reluctant to return to Stockholm was Blomkvist. In Stockholm she would risk running into Kalle Fucking Blomkvist, and at the moment that was just about the last thing she wanted to do. He had hurt her. She acknowledged that this had not been his intention. He had behaved rather decently. It was her own fault that she had fallen “in love” with him. The very phrase was a contradiction when it came to Lisbeth Fucking Bitch Salander.

Blomkvist was known for being a ladies’ man. At best she had been an amusing diversion, someone on whom he had taken pity at a moment when he needed her and there was no-one better available. But he had quickly moved on to yet more amusing company. She cursed herself for lowering her guard and letting him into her life.

When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck you. He had noticed her just as the doors closed and looked at her with searching eyes before she turned and walked away as the train pulled out.

She didn’t understand why he had so stubbornly tried to stay in contact with her, as if she were some fucking welfare project he had taken on. It annoyed her that he was so clueless. Every time he sent her an email she had to force herself to delete the message without reading it.

Stockholm did not seem in the least attractive. Apart from the freelance work for Milton Security, a few discarded bed partners, and the girls in the old rock group Evil Fingers, she hardly knew anyone in her hometown.

The only person she had any respect for now was Armansky. It was not easy to define her feelings for him. She had always felt a mild surprise that she was attracted to him. If he had not been quite so married, or quite so old, or quite so conservative, she might have considered making an advance.

So she took out her diary and turned to the atlas section. She had never been to Australia or Africa. She had read about but never seen the Pyramids or Angkor Wat. She had never ridden on the Star Ferry between Kowloon and Victoria in Hong Kong, and she had never gone snorkelling in the Caribbean or sat on a beach in Thailand. Apart from some quick business trips when she had visited the Baltics and neighbouring Nordic countries, as well as Zurich and London, of course, she had hardly ever left Sweden. As a matter of fact, she had seldom been outside Stockholm.

In the past she could never afford it.

She stood at the window of her hotel room overlooking Via Garibaldi in Rome. The city was like a pile of ruins. Then she made up her mind. She put on her jacket and went down to the lobby and asked if there was a travel agent in the vicinity. She booked a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv and spent the following days walking through the Old City in Jerusalem and visiting the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Wailing Wall. She viewed the armed soldiers on street corners with distrust, and then she flew to Bangkok and kept on travelling for the rest of the year.

There was only one thing she really had to do. She went to Gibraltar twice. The first time to do an in-depth investigation of the man she had chosen to look after her money. The second time to see to it that he was doing it properly.

It felt quite odd to turn the key to her own apartment on Fiskargatan after such a long time.

She set down her groceries and her shoulder bag in the hall and tapped in the four-digit code that turned off the electronic burglar alarm. Then she stripped off her damp clothes and dropped them on the hall floor. She walked into the kitchen naked, plugged in the refrigerator, and put the food away before she headed for the bathroom and spent the next ten minutes in the shower. She ate a meal consisting of a Billy’s Pan Pizza, which she heated in the microwave, and a sliced apple. She opened one of her moving boxes and found a pillow, some sheets, and a blanket that smelled a little suspect after having been packed away for a year. She made up her bed on the mattress in a room next to the kitchen.

She fell asleep within ten seconds of her head hitting the pillow and slept for almost twelve hours. Then she got up, turned on the coffeemaker, wrapped a blanket around herself, and sat in the dark on a window seat, smoking a cigarette and looking out towards Djurgården and Saltsjön, fascinated by the lights.

The day after Salander came home was a full day. She locked the door of her apartment at 7:00 in the morning. Before she left her floor she opened a ventilation window in the stairwell and fastened a spare key to a thin copper wire that she had tied to the wall side of a drainpipe clamp. Experience had taught her the wisdom of always having a spare key readily accessible.

The air outside was icy. Salander was dressed in a pair of thin, worn jeans that had a rip beneath one back pocket where her blue panties showed through. She had on a T-shirt and a warm polo sweater with a seam that had started to fray at the neck. She had also rediscovered her scuffed leather jacket with the rivets on the shoulders, and decided she should ask a tailor to repair the almost nonexistent lining in the pockets. She was wearing heavy socks and boots. Overall, she was nice and warm.

She walked down St.Paulsgatan to Zinkensdamm and over to her old apartment on Lundagatan. She checked first of all that her Kawasaki was still safe in the basement. She patted the seat before she went up to the apartment and had to push the front door open against a mountain of junk mail.

She hadn’t been sure what to do with the apartment, so when she’d left Sweden a year ago, the simplest solution had been to arrange an automatic bank account to pay her regular bills. She still had furniture in the apartment, laboriously collected over time from various trash containers, along with some chipped mugs, two older computers, and a lot of paper. But nothing of value.

She took a black trash bag from the kitchen and spent five minutes sorting the junk from the real mail. Most of the heap went straight into the plastic bag. There were a few letters for her, mainly bank statements and tax forms from Milton Security. One advantage of being under guardianship was that she never had to deal with tax matters – communications of that sort were conspicuous by their absence. Otherwise, in a whole year she had accumulated only three personal letters.

The first was from a lawyer, Greta Molander, who had served as executor for Salander’s mother. The letter stated that her mother’s estate had been settled and that Lisbeth Salander and her sister Camilla had inherited 9,312 kronor each. A deposit of said amount had been made to Ms. Salander’s bank account. Would she please confirm receipt? Salander stuffed the letter in the inside pocket of her jacket.

The second was from Director Mikaelsson of Äppelviken Nursing Home, a friendly reminder that they were storing a box of her mother’s personal effects. Would she please contact Äppelviken with instructions as to what she would like done with these items? The letter ended with the warning that if they did not hear from Salander or her sister (for whom they had no address) before the end of the year, they would have no alternative – space being at a premium – but to discard the items. She saw that the letter was dated June, and she took out her mobile telephone. The box was still there. She apologized for not responding sooner and promised to pick it up the next day.

The last letter was from Blomkvist. She thought for a moment before deciding not to open it, and threw it into the bag.

She filled another box with various items and knickknacks that she wanted to keep, then took a taxi back to Mosebacke. She put on makeup, a pair of glasses, and a blond shoulder-length wig and tucked a Norwegian passport in the name of Irene Nesser into her bag. She studied herself in the mirror and decided that Irene Nesser looked a little bit like Lisbeth Salander, but was still a completely different person.

After a quick lunch of a Brie baguette and a latte at Café Eden on Götgatan, she walked down to the car rental agency on Ringvägen, where Irene Nesser rented a Nissan Micra. She drove to IKEA at Kungens Kurva and spent three hours browsing through the merchandise, writing down the item numbers she needed. She made a few quick decisions.

She bought two Karlanda sofas with sand-coloured upholstery, five Poäng armchairs, two round side tables of clear-lacquered birch, a Svansbo coffee table, and several Lack occasional tables. From the storage department she ordered two Ivar combination storage units and two Bonde bookshelves, a TV stand, and a Magiker unit with doors. She settled on a Pax Nexus three-door wardrobe and two small Malm bureaus.

She spent a long time selecting a bed, and decided on a Hemnes bed frame with mattress and bedside tables. To be on the safe side, she also bought a Lillehammer bed to put in the spare room. She didn’t plan on having any guests, but since she had a guest room she might as well furnish it.

The bathroom in her new apartment was already equipped with a medicine cabinet, towel storage, and a washing machine the previous owners had left behind. All she had to buy was a cheap laundry basket.

What she did need, though, was kitchen furniture. After some thought she decided on a Rosfors kitchen table of solid beechwood with a tabletop of tempered glass and four colourful kitchen chairs.

She also needed furniture for her office. She looked at some improbable “work stations” with ingenious cabinets for storing computers and keyboards. In the end she shook her head and ordered an ordinary desk, the Galant, in beech veneer with an angled top and rounded corners, and a large filing cabinet. She took a long time choosing an office chair – in which she would no doubt spend many hours – and chose one of the most expensive options, the Verksam.

She made her way through the entire warehouse and bought a good supply of sheets, pillowcases, hand towels, duvets, blankets, pillows, a starter pack of stainless steel cutlery, some crockery, pots and pans, cutting boards, three big rugs, several work lamps, and a huge quantity of office supplies – folders, file boxes, wastepaper baskets, storage boxes, and the like.

She paid with a card in the name of Wasp Enterprises and showed her Irene Nesser ID. She also paid to have the items delivered and assembled. The bill came to a little over 90,000 kronor.

She was back in Söder by 5:00 p.m. and had time for a quick visit to Axelsson’s Home Electronics, where she bought a nineteen-inch TV and a radio. Just before closing time she slipped into a store on Hornsgatan and bought a vacuum cleaner. At Mariahallen market she bought a mop, dishwashing liquid, a bucket, some detergent, hand soap, toothbrushes, and a giant package of toilet paper.

She was tired but pleased after her shopping frenzy. She stowed all her purchases in her rented Nissan Micra and then collapsed in Café Java on Hornsgatan. She borrowed an evening paper from the next table and learned that the Social Democrats were still the ruling party and that nothing of great significance seemed to have occurred in Sweden while she had been away.

She was home by 8:00. Under cover of darkness she unloaded her car and carried the items up to V. Kulla’s apartment. She left everything in a big pile in the hall and spent half an hour trying to find somewhere to park. Then she ran water in the Jacuzzi, which was easily big enough for three people. She thought about Blomkvist for a moment. Until she saw the letter from him that morning, she had not thought about him for several months. She wondered whether he was home, and whether the Berger woman was there now in his apartment.

After a while she took a deep breath, turned over on her stomach, and sank beneath the surface of the water. She put her hands on her breasts and pinched her nipples hard, holding her breath for far too long, until her lungs began to ache.

Erika Berger, editor in chief, checked her clock when Blomkvist arrived. He was almost fifteen minutes late for the planning meeting that was held on the second Tuesday of each month at 10:00 a.m. sharp. Tentative plans for the next issue were outlined, and decisions about the content of the magazine were made for several months in advance.

Blomkvist apologized for his late arrival and muttered an explanation that nobody heard or at least bothered to acknowledge. Apart from Berger, the meeting included the managing editor, Malin Eriksson, partner and art director Christer Malm, the reporter Monika Nilsson, and part-timers Lotta Karim and Henry Cortez. Blomkvist saw at once that the intern was absent, but that the group had been augmented by a new face at the small conference table in Berger’s office. It was very unusual for her to let an outsider in on Millennium’s planning sessions.

“This is Dag Svensson,” said Erika. “Freelancer. We’re going to buy an article from him.”

Blomkvist shook hands with the man. Svensson was blond and blue-eyed, with a crew cut and a three-day growth of beard. He was around thirty and looked shamelessly fit.

“We usually run one or two themed issues each year.” Berger went on where she had left off. “I want to use this story in the May issue. The printer is booked for April 27th. That gives us a good three months to produce the articles.”

“So what’s the theme?” Blomkvist wondered aloud as he poured coffee from the thermos.

“Dag came to me last week with the outline for a story. That’s why I asked him to join us today. Will you take it from here, Dag?” Berger said.

“Trafficking,” Svensson said. “That is, the sex trade. In this case primarily of girls from the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe. If you’ll allow me to start at the beginning – I’m writing a book on the subject and that’s why I contacted Millennium – since you now have a book-publishing operation.”

Everyone looked amused. Millennium Publishing had so far issued exactly one book, Blomkvist’s year-old brick about the billionaire Wennerström’s financial empire. The book was in its sixth printing in Sweden, had been published in Norwegian, German, and English, and was soon to be translated into French too. The sales success was remarkable given that the story was by now so well known and had been reported in every newspaper.

“Our book-publishing ventures are not very extensive,” Blomkvist said cautiously.

Even Svensson gave a slight smile. “I understand that. But you do have the means to publish a book.”

“There are plenty of larger companies,” Blomkvist said. “Well-established ones.”

“Without a doubt,” Berger said. “But for a year now we’ve been discussing the possibility of starting a niche publication list in addition to our regular activities. We’ve brought it up at two board meetings, and everyone has been positive. We’re thinking of a very small list – three or four books a year – of reportage on various topics. Typical journalistic publications, in other words. This would be a good book to start with.”

“Trafficking,” Blomkvist said. “Tell us about it.”

“I’ve been digging around in the subject of trafficking for four years now. I got into the topic through my girlfriend – her name is Mia Johansson and she’s a criminologist and gender studies scholar. She previously worked at the Crime Prevention Centre and wrote a report on the sex trade.”

“I’ve met her,” Eriksson said suddenly. “I did an interview with her two years ago when she published a report comparing the way men and women were treated by the courts.”

Svensson smiled. “That did create a stir. But she’s been researching trafficking for five or six years. That’s how we met. I was working on a story about the sex trade on the Internet and got a tip that she knew something about it. And she did. To make a long story short: she and I began working together, I as a journalist and she as a researcher. In the process we started dating, and a year ago we moved in together. She’s working on her doctorate and she’ll be defending her dissertation this year.”

“So she’s writing a doctoral thesis while you…?”

“I’m writing a popular version of her dissertation and adding my own research. As well as a shorter version in the form of the article that I outlined for Erika.”

“OK, you’re working as a team. What’s the story?”

“We have a government that introduced a tough sex-trade law, we have police who are supposed to see to it that the law is obeyed, and we have courts that are supposed to convict sex criminals – we call the johns sex criminals since it has become a crime to buy sexual services – and we have the media, which write indignant articles about the subject, et cetera. At the same time, Sweden is one of the countries that imports the most prostitutes per capita from Russia and the Baltics.”

“And you can substantiate this?”

“It’s no secret. It’s not even news. What’s new is that we have met and talked with a dozen girls. Most of them are fifteen to twenty years old. They come from social misery in Eastern Europe and are lured to Sweden with a promise of some kind of job but end up in the clutches of an unscrupulous sex mafia. Those girls have experienced things that you couldn’t even show in a movie.”

“OK.”

“It’s the focus of Mia’s dissertation, so to speak. But not of the book.”

Everyone was listening intently.

“Mia interviewed the girls. What I did was to chart the suppliers and the client base.”

Blomkvist smiled. He had never met Svensson before, but he felt at once that Svensson was the kind of journalist he liked – someone who got right to the heart of the story. For Blomkvist the golden rule of journalism was that there were always people who were responsible. The bad guys.

“And you found some interesting facts?”

“I can document, for instance, that a civil servant in the Ministry of Justice who was involved with the drafting of the sex-trade law has exploited at least two girls who came to Sweden through the agency of the sex mafia. One of them was fifteen.”

“Whoa.”

“I’ve been working on this story off and on for three years. The book will contain case studies of the johns. There are three policemen, one of whom works for the Security Police, another on the vice squad. There are five lawyers, one prosecutor, and one judge. There are also three journalists, one of whom has written articles on the sex trade. In his private life he’s into rape fantasies with a teenage whore from Tallinn – and in this case it’s not consensual sex play. I’m thinking of naming names. I’ve got watertight documentation.”

Blomkvist whistled. “Since I’ve become publisher again, I’ll want to go over the documentation with a fine-tooth comb,” he said. “The last time I was sloppy about checking sources I ended up spending two months in prison.”

“If you want to publish the story I can give you all the documentation you want. But I have one condition for selling the story to Millennium.”

“Dag wants us to publish the book too,” Berger said.

“Precisely. I want it to be dropped like a bomb, and right now Millennium is the most credible and outspoken magazine in the country. I don’t believe any other publisher would dare publish a book of this type.”

“So, no book, no article?” said Blomkvist.

“I think it sounds seriously good,” Eriksson said. There was a murmur of agreement from Cortez.

“The article and the book are two different things,” Berger said. “For the magazine, Mikael is the publisher and responsible for the content. With regard to the book publication, the author is responsible for the content.”

“I know,” Svensson said. “That doesn’t bother me. The moment the book is published, Mia will file a police report against everyone I name.”

“That’ll stir up a hell of a fuss,” Cortez said.

“That’s only half the story,” said Svensson. “I’ve also been analyzing some of the networks that make money off the sex trade. We’re talking about organized crime.”

“And who’s involved?”

“That’s what’s so tragic. The sex mafia is a sleazy bunch of nobodies. I don’t really know what I expected when I started this research, but somehow we – at least I – had the idea that the ‘mafia’ was a gang in the upper echelon of society. A number of American movies on the subject have probably contributed to that image. Your story about Wennerström” – Svensson turned to Blomkvist – “also showed that sometimes this is actually the case. But Wennerström was an exception in a sense. What I’ve turned up is a gang of brutal and sadistic losers who can hardly read or write; they’re total morons when it comes to organization and strategic thinking. There are connections to bikers and somewhat more organized groups, but in general it’s a bunch of assholes who run the sex business.”

“This is all made clear in your article,” Berger said. “We have laws and a police force and a judicial system that we finance with millions of kronor in taxes each year to deal with the sex trade… and they can’t even nail a bunch of morons.”

“It’s a tremendous assault on human rights, and the girls involved are so far down society’s ladder that they’re of no interest to the legal system. They don’t vote. They can hardly speak Swedish except for the vocabulary they need to set up a trick. Of all crimes involving the sex trade, 99.99 percent are not reported to the police, and those that are hardly ever lead to a charge. This has got to be the biggest iceberg of all in the Swedish criminal world. Imagine if bank robberies were handled with the same nonchalance. It’s unthinkable. Unfortunately I’ve come to the conclusion that this method of handling the problem would not survive for a single day if it weren’t for the fact that the criminal justice system simply does not want to deal with it. Attacks on teenage girls from Tallinn and Riga are not a priority. A whore is a whore. It’s part of the system.”

“And everyone knows it,” Nilsson said.

“So what do you all think?” Berger said.

“I like it,” Blomkvist said. “We’ll be sticking our necks out with that story, and that was the whole point of starting Millennium in the first place.”

“That’s why I’m still working at the magazine. The publisher has to jump off a cliff every now and then,” Nilsson said.

Everyone laughed except Blomkvist.

“He was the only one crazy enough to take on the job of publisher,” Berger said. “We’re going to run this in May. And your book will come out at the same time.”

“Is the book done?” Blomkvist said.

“No. I have the whole outline but only half the text. If you agree to publish the book and give me an advance, then I can work on it full-time. Almost all the research is done. All that’s left are some supplementary details – actually just checking stuff I already know – and confronting the johns I’m going to hang out to dry.”

“We’ll produce it just like the Wennerström book. It’ll take a week to do the layout” – Malm nodded – “and two weeks to print. We’ll complete the confrontations in March and April and sum it all up in a final fifteen-page section. We’ll have the manuscript ready by April 15 so we’ll have time to go over all the sources.”

“How will we work things with the contract and so on?”

“I’ve drawn up a book contract once before, but I’ll probably have to have a talk with our lawyer.” Berger frowned. “But I propose a short-term contract from February to May. We don’t pay over the odds.”

“That’s fine with me. I just need a basic salary.”

“Otherwise the rule of thumb is fifty-fifty on the earnings from the book after the costs are paid. How does that sound?”

“That sounds damn good,” Svensson said.

“Work assignments,” Berger said. “Malin, I want you to plan the themed issue. It will be your primary responsibility starting next month; you’ll work with Dag and edit the manuscript. Lotta, that means I want you here as temporary editorial assistant for the magazine from March through May. You’ll have to go full-time, and Malin or Mikael will back you up as time permits.”

Eriksson nodded.

“Mikael, I want you to be the editor of the book.” Berger looked at Svensson. “Mikael doesn’t let on, but he’s actually one hell of a good editor, and he knows research. He’ll put each syllable of your book under the microscope. He’s going to come down like a hawk on every detail. I’m flattered that you want us to publish your book, but we have special problems at Millennium. We have one or two enemies who want nothing more than for us to go under. If we stick out our necks to publish something like this, it has to be 100 percent accurate. We can’t afford anything less.”

“And I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

“Good. But can you put up with having somebody looking over your shoulder and criticizing you every which way all spring?”

Svensson grinned and looked at Blomkvist. “Bring it on.”

“If it’s going to be a themed issue, we’ll need more articles. Mikael – I want you to write about the finances of the sex trade. How much money are we talking about annually? Who makes the money from the sex trade and where does it go? Can we find evidence that some of the money ends up in government coffers? Monika – I want you to check out sexual attacks in general. Talk to the women’s shelters and researchers and doctors and welfare people. You two plus Dag will write the supporting articles. Henry – I want an interview with Mia Johansson – Dag can’t do it himself. Portrait: Who is she, what is she researching, and what are her conclusions? Then I want you to go in and do case studies from police reports. Christer-pictures. I don’t know how we’re going to illustrate this. Think about it.”

“This is probably the simplest theme of all to illustrate. Arty. No problem.”

“Let me add one thing,” Svensson said. “There’s a small minority on the police force who are doing a hell of a fine job. It might be an idea to interview some of them.”

“Have you got any names?” Cortez said.

“Phone numbers too,” Svensson said.

“Great,” Berger said. “The theme of the May issue is the sex trade. The point we have to make is that trafficking is a crime against human rights and that these criminals must be exposed and treated like war criminals or death squads or torturers anywhere in the world. Now let’s get going.”

CHAPTER 5

Äppelviken felt unfamiliar, even foreign, when for the first time in eighteen months Salander turned into the drive in her rented Nissan Micra. From the age of fifteen she had come twice a year to the nursing home where her mother had been since “All The Evil” had happened. Her mother had spent ten years at Äppelviken, and it was where she finally died at only forty-six, after one last annihilating cerebral haemorrhage.

The last fourteen years of Agneta Sofia Salander’s life had been punctuated by small cerebral haemorrhages which left her unable to take care of herself. Sometimes she had not even been able to recognize her daughter.

Thinking about her mother always pitched Salander into a mood of helplessness and darkness black as night. As a teenager she had cherished the fantasy that her mother would get well and that they would be able to form some sort of relationship. That was her heart thinking. Her head knew that it would never happen.

Her mother had been short and thin, but nowhere near as anorexic-looking as Salander. In fact, her mother had been downright beautiful, and had a lovely figure. Just like Salander’s sister, Camilla.

Salander did not want to think about her sister.

For Salander it was an irony of fate that she and her sister were so dramatically dissimilar. They were twins, born within twenty minutes of each other.

Lisbeth was first. Camilla was beautiful.

They were so different that it seemed grossly unlikely that they could have come from the same womb. If something hadn’t gone wrong with her genetic code, Lisbeth would have been as radiantly beautiful as her sister. And probably as crazy.

From the time they were little girls Camilla had been outgoing, popular, and successful at school, while Lisbeth had been ungiving and introverted, rarely responding to the teachers’ questions. Camilla’s grades were very good; Lisbeth’s never were. Already in elementary school Camilla had distanced herself from her sister to the point that she would not even take the same route to school that Lisbeth took. Teachers and friends noticed that the two girls never had anything to do with each other, never sat next to each other. From the age of eight they had been in separate classes. When they were twelve and “All The Evil” happened, they had been sent to different foster homes. They had not seen each other since their seventeenth birthday, and that meeting had ended with Lisbeth getting a black eye and Camilla a fat lip. Lisbeth did not know where Camilla was living now, and she hadn’t made any attempt to find out.

In Lisbeth’s eyes Camilla was insincere, corrupt, and manipulative. But it was Lisbeth whom society had declared incompetent.

She zipped up her leather jacket before she walked through the rain to the main entrance. She stopped at a garden bench and looked around. On this very spot eighteen months ago, she had seen her mother for the last time. She had paid an unscheduled visit to the nursing home when she was on her way north to help Blomkvist in his attempt to track down a serial killer. Her mother had been restless and didn’t seem to recognize Salander. She held on tight to her hand and looked at her with a bewildered expression. Salander was in a hurry. She loosened her mother’s grip, gave her a hug, and rode away on her motorcycle.

The director of Äppelviken, Agnes Mikaelsson, greeted her warmly and took her to a storeroom where they found the cardboard box. Salander hefted it. Only five or six pounds. Not much in the way of an inheritance.

“I had a feeling you’d come back someday,” Mikaelsson said.

“I’ve been out of the country,” Salander said.

She thanked her for saving the box, carried it back to the car, and left Äppelviken for the last time.

Salander was back in Mosebacke just after noon. She put her mother’s box unopened in a hall closet and left the apartment again.

As she opened the front door a police car drove slowly past. Salander warily observed the presence of the authorities outside her building, but when they showed no sign of interest in her she put them out of her mind.

She went shopping at H&M and KappAhl department stores and bought herself a new wardrobe. She picked up a large assortment of basic clothes in the form of pants, jeans, tops, and socks. She had no interest in expensive designer clothing, but she did enjoy being able to buy half a dozen pairs of jeans at one time without a second thought. Her most extravagant purchases were from Twilfit, where she chose a drawerful of panties and bras. This was basic clothing again, but after half an hour of embarrassed searching she also settled on a set that she thought was sexy, even erotic, and which she would never have dreamed of buying before. When she tried them on that night she felt incredibly foolish. What she saw in the mirror was a thin, tattooed girl in grotesque underwear. She took them off and threw them in the trash.

She also bought herself some winter shoes and two pairs of lighter indoor shoes. Then she bought a pair of black boots with high heels that made her a couple of inches taller. She also found a good winter jacket in brown suede.

She made coffee and a sandwich before she drove the rental car back to its garage near Ringen. She walked home and sat in the dark all evening on her window seat, watching the water in Saltsjön.

Mia Johansson cut the cheesecake and decorated each slice with a scoop of raspberry ice cream. She served Berger and Blomkvist first before she put down plates for Svensson and herself. Eriksson had resolutely resisted dessert and was content with black coffee in an old-fashioned flowered porcelain cup.

“It was my grandmother’s china service,” said Mia when she saw Eriksson examining the cup.

“She’s scared to death that a cup is going to break,” Svensson said. “She takes it out only when we have really important guests.”

Johansson smiled. “I spent several years with my grandmother when I was a child, and the china is almost all I have left of her.”

“They’re really beautiful,” Eriksson said. “My kitchen is one hundred percent IKEA.”

Blomkvist didn’t give a damn about flowered coffee cups and instead cast an appraising eye on the plate with the cheesecake. He pondered letting his belt out a notch. Berger apparently shared his feelings.

“Good God, I should have said no to dessert too,” she said, glancing ruefully at Eriksson before taking up her spoon with a firm grip.

It was supposed to be a simple working dinner, in part to cement the cooperation they had agreed on and in part to continue to discuss plans for the themed issue. Svensson had suggested that they meet at his place for a bite to eat, and Johansson had served the best sweet-and-sour chicken Blomkvist had ever tasted. Over dinner they put away two bottles of robust Spanish red, and Svensson asked if anyone would like a glass of Tullamore Dew with their dessert. Only Berger was foolish enough to decline, and Svensson got out the glasses.

It was a one-bedroom apartment in Enskede. Svensson and Johansson had been going out for a few years, but had taken the plunge and moved in together a year ago.

The group gathered at around 6:00 p.m., and by the time dessert was served at 8:30 not a word had been said about the ostensible reason for the dinner. But Blomkvist did discover that he liked his hosts and enjoyed their company.

It was Berger who finally steered the conversation to the topic they had all come to discuss. Johansson produced a printout of her thesis and placed it on the table in front of Berger. It had a surprisingly ironic title – “From Russia with Love” – an homage, of course, to Ian Fleming’s classic novel. The subtitle was “Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Society’s Response.”

“You have to recognize the difference between my thesis and the book Dag is writing,” she said. “Dag’s book is a polemic aimed at the people who are making money from trafficking. My thesis is statistics, field studies, law texts, and a study of how society and the courts treat the victims.”

“The girls, you mean.”

“Young girls, usually fifteen to twenty years old, working class, poorly educated. They often have unstable home lives, and many of them are subjected to some form of abuse even in childhood. One reason they come to Sweden is that they have been fed a pack of lies.”

“By the sex traders.”

“In this sense there is a sort of gender perspective to my thesis. It’s not often that a researcher can establish roles along gender lines so clearly. Girls – victims; boys – perpetrators. Apart from a handful of women working on their own who profit from the sex trade, there is no other form of criminality in which the sex roles themselves are a precondition for the crime. Nor is there any other form of criminality in which social acceptance is so great, or which society does so little to prevent.”

“And yet Sweden does have tough laws against trafficking and the sex trade,” Berger said. “Is that not the case?”

“Don’t make me laugh. Several hundred girls – there are no published statistics, obviously – are transported to Sweden every year to work as prostitutes, which in this case means making their bodies available for systematic rape. After the law against trafficking went into effect, it was tested in the courts a few times. The first time was in April 2003, the case against that crazy brothel madam who had a sex change. And she was acquitted, of course.”

“I thought she was convicted.”

“Of running a brothel, yes. But she was acquitted of trafficking charges. The thing was, the girls who were the victims were also the witnesses against her, and they vanished back to the Baltics. Interpol tried to track them down, but after months of searching it was decided that they were not going to be found.”

“What had become of them?”

“Nothing. The TV show Insider did a follow-up and went over to Tallinn. It took the reporters exactly one afternoon to find two of the girls, who were living with their parents. The third girl had moved to Italy.”

“The police in Tallinn, in other words, weren’t very effective.”

“Since then we have actually won a couple of convictions, but in each case they were men who had been arrested for other crimes, or who were so conspicuously stupid that they couldn’t help but be caught. The law is pure window dressing. It isn’t enforced. And the problem here,” Svensson said, “is that the crime is aggravated rape, often in conjunction with abuse, aggravated abuse, and death threats, and in some instances illegal imprisonment as well. That’s everyday life for many of the girls who are brought, wearing miniskirts and heavy makeup, to some villa in the suburbs. The thing is that a girl like that doesn’t have any choice. Either she goes out and fucks dirty old men or she risks being abused and tortured by her pimp. The girls can’t run away – they don’t know the language, they don’t know the law, and they don’t know where they could turn. They can’t go home because their passports have been taken away, and in the case of the brothel madam the girls were locked in an apartment.”

“It sounds like slave labour camps. Do the girls make any money at all?”

“Oh yeah,” Johansson said. “They usually work for several months before they’re allowed to go back home. They’re given between 20,000 and 30,000 kronor, which in Russian money is a small fortune. Unfortunately they’ve often picked up heavy alcohol or drug habits and a lifestyle that means the money will run out very quickly. This makes the system self-sustaining: after a while they’re back again and return voluntarily, so to speak, to their torturers.”

“How much money is this business turning over annually?” Blomkvist asked.

Mia glanced at Svensson and thought for a moment before she responded.

“It’s very hard to give an accurate answer. We’ve calculated back and forth, but most of our figures are necessarily estimates.”

“Give us a broad brush.”

“OK, we know, for example, that the madam, the one convicted of procuring but acquitted of trafficking, brought thirty-five women from the East over a two-year period. They were all here for anything from a few weeks to several months. In the course of the trial it emerged that over those two years they took in two million kronor. I have worked out that a girl can bring in an estimated 60,000 kronor a month. Of this about 15,000, say, is costs – travel, clothing, full board, etc. It’s no life of luxury; they may have to crash with a bunch of other girls in some apartment the gang provides for them. Of the remaining 45,000 kronor, the gang takes between 20,000 and 30,000. The gang leader stuffs half into his own pocket, say 15,000, and divides the rest among his employees – drivers, muscle, others. The girl gets to keep 10,000 to 12,000 kronor.”

“And per month?”

“Suppose a gang has two or three girls grinding away for them, and they take in around 150,000 a month. A gang consists of two or three people, and that’s their living. That’s about how the finances of rape look.”

“And how many of them are we talking about… if you extrapolate?”

“At any given time there are about a hundred active girls who are in some way victims of trafficking. That means the total income in Sweden each month would be around six million kronor, around seventy million per year. And that’s only the girls who are victims of trafficking.”

“That sounds like small change.”

“It is small change. And to bring in these relatively modest sums, around a hundred girls have to be raped. It drives me mad.”

“That sounds like an objective researcher! But how many creeps are living off these girls?”

“I reckon about three hundred.”

“That doesn’t sound like an insurmountable problem,” Berger said.

“We pass laws and the media gets outraged, but hardly anyone has actually talked to one of these girls from the East or has any idea how they live.”

“How does it work? I mean, in practice. It’s probably fairly difficult to bring a sixteen-year-old over here from Tallinn without anyone noticing. How does it work once they arrive?” Blomkvist asked.

“When I started researching this, I thought we were talking about an incredibly well-run organization with some form of professional mafia spiriting girls unnoticed across the borders.”

“But it’s not?” Eriksson said.

“The business is organized, but I came to the conclusion that we’re talking about many small and badly organized gangs. Forget the Armani suits and the sports cars – the average gang is half Russians or Balts and half Swedes. The gang leader is typically forty, has very little education, and has had problems all his life. His view of women is pure stone age. There’s a clear pecking order in the gang and his associates are often afraid of him. He’s violent, frequently high, and he beats the shit out of anyone who steps out of line.”

Salander’s furniture from IKEA was delivered at 9:30 in the morning three days later. Two extremely robust citizens shook hands with blond Irene Nesser, who spoke with a sprightly Norwegian accent. They began at once, shuttling the boxes up to the apartment in the undersized elevator, and spent the day assembling tables, cabinets, and beds. Irene Nesser went down to Söderhallarna market to buy Greek takeout for their lunch.

The men from IKEA were gone by midafternoon. Salander took off her wig and strolled around her apartment wondering how she was going to like living in her new home. The kitchen table looked too elegant to be true. The room next to the kitchen, with doors from both the hall and the kitchen, was her new living room, with modern sofas and armchairs around a coffee table by the window. She was pleased with the bedroom and sat down tentatively on the Hemnes bedstead to test the mattress.

She sat at the desk in her office, enjoying the view of Saltsjön. Yes, this is a good setup. I can work here.

What she was going to work on, though, she didn’t know.

Salander spent the rest of the evening unpacking and arranging her belongings. She made the bed and put the towels, sheets, and pillowcases in the linen closet. She opened the bags of new clothes and hung them in the closets. In spite of all she had bought, it filled only a fraction of the space. She put the lamps in place and arranged the pots and pans, the crockery, and the cutlery in the kitchen cupboards and drawers.

She looked critically at the empty walls and realized that she was going to have to find some posters or pictures. A vase for flowers wouldn’t hurt either.

Then she opened her cardboard boxes from Lundagatan and put away books, magazines, clippings, and old research papers that she probably should have thrown away. Without any regret, she discarded her old T-shirts and socks with holes in them. Suddenly she found a dildo, still in its original box. She smiled wryly. It had been one of those freaky birthday presents from Mimmi. She had entirely forgotten that she had it and had never even tried it. She decided to rectify that situation and set the dildo on her bedside table.

Then she became serious. Mimmi. She felt a pang of guilt. She had been with Mimmi fairly regularly for a year and then left her for Blomkvist without a word of explanation. She had not said goodbye or told her she was thinking of leaving the country. Nor had she said goodbye to Armansky or told the girls in Evil Fingers anything at all. They must think she was dead, or else they had simply forgotten about her – she had never been a central figure in the group.

She realized at that moment that she had not said goodbye to George Bland on Grenada either, and she wondered whether he was walking on the beach looking for her. She remembered what Blomkvist had told her about friendship being based on respect and trust. I keep squandering my friends. She wondered whether Mimmi was still around, whether she should try to get in touch with her.

She spent most of the evening and a good part of the night sorting papers in her office, installing her computers, and surfing the Net. She did a swift check of her investments and found that she was better off than she had been a year earlier.

She did a routine check of Bjurman’s computer but found nothing in his correspondence that gave her reason to think that he was not toeing the line. He seemed to have scaled back his professional and private activities to a semi-vegetative state. He seldom used email, and when he surfed the Internet he mostly went on porn sites.

She did not log off until around 2:00 in the morning. She went into the bedroom and undressed, flinging her clothes over a chair. In the bathroom mirror she looked at herself for a long time, examining her angular, asymmetrical face, her new breasts. And the tattoo on her back – it was beautiful, a curving dragon in red, green, and black. During the year of her travels she had let her hair grow to shoulder length, but at the end of her stay on Grenada she had taken a pair of scissors to it. It still stuck out in all directions.

She felt that some fundamental change had taken place or was taking place in her life. Maybe it was having access to billions of kronor and not having to think about every krona she spent. Maybe it was the adult world which was belatedly pushing its way into her life. Maybe it was the realization that, with her mother’s death, her childhood had come to an end.

During the operation on her breasts at the clinic in Genoa, a ring in her nipple had to be removed. Then she had done away with a ring from her lower lip, and on Grenada she had taken the ring out of her left labium – it had chafed, and she had no idea why she had let herself be pierced there in the first place.

She yawned and unscrewed the stud she had had through her tongue for seven years. She put it in a bowl on the shelf next to the sink. Her mouth felt empty. Apart from the rings in her earlobes, she had now only two piercings left: a ring in her left eyebrow and a jewel in her navel.

At last she crept under her new duvet. The bed she had bought was gigantic; she felt as if she were lying on the edge of a soccer field. She pulled the duvet around her and thought for a long time.

CHAPTER 6

Salander took the elevator from the garage to the third floor, the uppermost floor occupied by Milton Security in the office building near Slussen. She opened the elevator door with a card key that she had pirated several years earlier. She automatically glanced at her watch as she stepped into the unlit corridor. Sunday, 3:10 a.m. The night watchman would be sitting at the alarm station on the second floor, a long way from the elevator shaft, and she knew that she would almost certainly have this floor to herself.

She was, as always, astonished that a security company had such basic lapses in its own operations.

Not much had changed on the third floor in the year that had passed. She began by visiting her old office, a cubicle behind a glass wall in the corridor where Armansky had installed her. The door was unlocked. Absolutely nothing had changed, except that someone had set a cardboard box of wastepaper inside the door: the desk, the office chair, the wastepaper basket, one (empty) bookshelf, and an obsolete Dell PC with a pitifully small hard drive.

Salander could see nothing to suggest that Armansky had turned the room over to anyone else. She took this to be a good sign, but she knew that it did not mean much. It was space that could hardly be put to any sensible use.

Salander closed the door and strolled the length of the corridor, making sure that there was no night owl in any of the offices. She stopped at the coffee machine and pressed the button for a cup of cappuccino, then opened the door to Armansky’s office with her pirated card key.

His office was, as always, irritatingly tidy. She made a brisk tour of inspection and studied the bookshelf before sitting down at his desk and switching on his computer.

She fished out a CD from the inside pocket of her jacket and pushed it into the hard drive, then started a programme called Asphyxia 1.3. She had written it herself, and its only function was to upgrade Internet Explorer on Armansky’s computer to a more modern version. The procedure took about five minutes.

When she was done, she ejected the CD and rebooted the computer with the new version of Internet Explorer. The programme looked and behaved exactly like the original version, but it was a tiny bit larger and a microsecond slower. All installations were identical to the original, including the install date. There would be no trace of the new file.

She typed in an FTP address for a server in Holland and got a command screen. She clicked copy, wrote the name Armansky/MiltSec and clicked OK. The computer instantly began copying Armansky’s hard drive to the server in Holland. A clock indicated that the process would take thirty-four minutes.

While the transfer was in progress, she took the spare key to Armansky’s desk from a pot on the bookshelf and spent the next half hour bringing herself up to date on the files Armansky kept in his top right-hand desk drawer: his crucial, current jobs. When the computer dinged as a sign that the transfer was complete, she put the files back in the order that she had found them.

Then she shut down the computer and switched off the desk lamp, taking the empty cappuccino cup with her. She left the Milton Security building the same way she had come. It was 4:12 a.m.

She walked home and sat down at her PowerBook and logged on to the server in Holland, where she started a copy of Asphyxia 1.3. A window opened asking for the name of the hard drive. She had forty different options and scrolled down. She passed the hard drive for NilsEBjurman, which she usually glanced through every other month. She paused for a second at MikBlom/laptop and MikBlom/Office. She had not clicked on those icons for more than a year, and she wondered vaguely whether to delete them. But she then decided as a matter of principle to hang on to them – since she had gone to the trouble of hacking into a computer it would be stupid to delete the information and maybe one day have to do the whole procedure all over again. The same was true for an icon called Wennerström which she had not opened in a long time. The man of that name was dead. The icon Armansky/MiltSec, the last one created, was at the bottom of the list.

She could have cloned his hard drive earlier, but she had never bothered to because she worked at Milton and could easily retrieve any information that Armansky wanted to keep hidden from the rest of the world. Her trespassing in his computer was not malicious: she just wanted to know what the company was working on, to see the lay of the land. She clicked and a folder immediately opened with a new icon called ArmanskyHD. She tried out whether she could access the hard drive and checked that all the files were in place.

She read through Armansky’s reports, financial statements, and email until 7:00 a.m. Finally she crawled into bed and slept until 12:30 in the afternoon.

On the last Friday in January Millennium’s annual board meeting took place in the presence of the company’s bookkeeper, an outside auditor, and the four partners: Berger (30 percent), Blomkvist (20 percent), Malm (20 percent), and Harriet Vanger (30 percent). Eriksson was there as the representative of the staff and the staff committee, and the chair of the union at the magazine. The union consisted of Eriksson, Lotta Karim, Cortez, Nilsson, and marketing chief Sonny Magnusson. It was Eriksson’s first board meeting.

The meeting began at 4:00 and lasted an hour. Much of the time was spent on the financials and the audit report. Clearly Millennium was on a solid footing, very different from the crisis in which the company had been mired two years earlier. The auditors reported a profit of 2.1 million kronor, of which roughly 1 million was down to Blomkvist’s book about the Wennerström affair.

Berger proposed, and it was agreed, that 1 million be set aside as a fund against future crises; that 250,000 kronor be reserved for capital investments, such as new computers and other equipment, and repairs at the editorial offices; and that 300,000 kronor be earmarked for salary increases and to allow them to offer Cortez a full-time contract. Of the balance, a dividend of 50,000 kronor was proposed for each partner, and 100,000 kronor to be divided equally among the four employees regardless of whether they worked full- or part-time. Magnusson was to receive no bonus. His contract gave him a commission on the ads he sold, and periodically these made him the highest paid of all the staff. These proposals were adopted unanimously.

Blomkvist proposed that the freelance budget be reduced in favour of an additional part-time reporter. Blomkvist had Svensson in mind; he would then be able to use Millennium as a base for his freelance writing and later, if it all worked out, be hired full-time. The proposal met with resistance from Berger on the grounds that the magazine could not thrive without access to a large number of freelance articles. She was supported by Harriet Vanger; Malm abstained. It was decided that the freelance budget would not be touched, but it would be investigated whether adjustments of other expenses might be made. Everyone wanted Svensson on the staff, at the very least as a part-time contributor.

There followed a brief discussion about future direction and development plans; Berger was reelected as chair of the board for the coming year; and then the meeting was adjourned.

Eriksson had said not a word. She was content at the prospect that she and her colleagues would get a bonus of 25,000 kronor, more than a month’s salary.

At the close of the board meeting, Berger called for a partners’ meeting. Berger, Blomkvist, Malm, and Harriet Vanger remained while the others left the conference room. Berger declared the meeting open. “There is only one item on the agenda,” she said. “Harriet, according to the agreement we made with Henrik, his part ownership was to last for two years. The agreement is about to expire. We have to decide what is going to happen with your – or rather, Henrik’s – interest in Millennium.”

“We all know that my uncle’s investment was an impulsive gesture triggered by a most unusual situation,” Harriet said. “That situation no longer exists. What do you propose?”

Malm squirmed with annoyance. He was the only one in the room who did not know what that “unusual situation” was. Blomkvist and Berger had to keep the story from him. Berger had told him only that it was a matter so personal involving Blomkvist that he would never under any circumstances discuss it. Malm was smart enough to realize that Blomkvist’s silence had something to do with Hedestad and Harriet Vanger. He also knew that he didn’t need all the details to be able to make a decision, and he had enough respect for Blomkvist not to make an issue of it.

“The three of us have discussed the matter and we have arrived at a decision,” Berger said. She looked Harriet in the eye. “But before we explain our reasoning we would like to know what you think.”

Harriet Vanger glanced at them in turn. Her gaze lingered on Blomkvist, but she could not read anything from their expressions.

“If you want to buy the family out it will cost around three million kronor plus interest. Can you afford to buy us out?” she asked mildly.

“Yes, we can,” Blomkvist said with a smile.

He had been paid five million kronor by Henrik Vanger for the work he had done for the old industrial tycoon. Part of that work, ironically, had been to find out what had happened to Harriet, his niece.

“In that case, the decision is in your hands,” Harriet said. “The agreement stipulates that you can cancel the Vanger shareholding as of today. I would never have written a contract as sloppy as the one Henrik signed.”

“We can buy you out if we have to,” Berger said. “But the real question is what you want to do. You’re the CEO of a substantial industrial concern – two concerns, actually. Our annual budget might correspond to what you turn over during a coffee break. Why would you give your time to a business as marginal as Millennium?”

Harriet Vanger looked calmly at the chair of the board, saying nothing for a long moment. Then she turned to Blomkvist and replied:

“I’ve been the owner of something or other since the day I was born. And I spend my days running a corporation that has more intrigues than a four-hundred-page romance novel. When I first joined your board it was to fulfil obligations that I could not neglect. But you know what? During the past eighteen months I’ve realized that I’m having more fun on this board than on all the others put together.”

Blomkvist absorbed this thoughtfully. Vanger now turned to Malm.

“The problems you face at Millennium are small and manageable. Naturally the company wants to operate at a profit – that’s a given. But all of you have another goal – you want to achieve something.”

She took a sip from her glass of water and fixed her eyes on Berger.

“Exactly what that something is remains a bit unclear to me. The objective is hazy. You aren’t a political party or a special-interest group. You have no loyalties to consider except your own. But you pinpoint flaws in society, and you don’t mind entering into battles with public figures. Often you want to change things and make a real difference. You all pretend to be cynics and nihilists, but it’s your own morality that steers the magazine, and several times I’ve noticed that it’s quite a special sort of morality. I don’t know what to call it, except to say that Millennium has a soul. This is the only board I’m proud to be a part of.”

She fell silent for so long that Berger had to laugh.

“That sounds good. But you still haven’t answered the question.”

“This has been some of the wackiest, most absurd stuff I’ve ever been involved with, but I enjoy your company and I’ve had a great time. If you want me to stay on I gladly will.”

“OK,” Malm said. “We’ve been back and forth and we’re all agreed. We’ll buy you out.”

Vanger’s eyes widened. “You want to get rid of me?”

“When we signed the contract we had our heads on the block waiting for the axe. We had no choice. From the start we were counting the days until we could buy out your uncle.”

Berger opened a file, laid some papers on the table, and pushed them over to Vanger, together with a cheque for exactly the sum due. Vanger read through the papers and without a word she signed them.

“All right, then,” Berger said. “That was fairly painless. I want to put on record our gratitude to Henrik Vanger for all he did for Millennium. I hope you will convey this to him.”

“I will,” Harriet Vanger said in a neutral tone, betraying nothing of what she felt. She was both hurt and deeply disappointed that they had let her say that she wanted to stay and then had simply kicked her out.

“And now let me see if I can interest you in a completely different contract,” Berger said.

She took out another set of papers and slid them across the table.

“We were wondering if you personally had any interest in being a partner at Millennium. The price would be the same as the sum you’ve just received. The agreement has no time limits or exception clauses. You would be a full partner with the same responsibilities as the rest of us.”

Vanger raised her eyebrows. “Why this roundabout process?”

“It had to be done sooner or later,” Malm said. “We could have renewed the old agreement a year at a time or until the board had an argument and put you out. But it was always a contract that would have to be dissolved.”

Harriet leaned on her elbow and gave him a searching glance. She looked at Blomkvist and then at Berger.

“We signed our agreement with Henrik when we were in financial straits,” Berger said. “We’re offering you this agreement because we want to. And unlike the old one, it won’t let us boot you out so easily in the future.”

“That’s a very big difference for us,” Blomkvist said in a low voice, and that was his only contribution to the discussion.

“The fact is that we believe you add something to Millennium besides the financial underpinning implied by the name of Vanger,” Berger said.

“You’re smart and sensible and you come up with constructive solutions. Until now you’ve kept a low profile, almost like a guest visiting us once a quarter, but you represent for this board a stability and direction that we’ve never had before. You know business. Once you asked if you could trust me, and I wondered the same thing about you. By now we both know the answer. I like you and I trust you – we all do. We don’t want you to be a part of us by way of some complicated legal mumbo jumbo. We want you as a partner and a real shareholder.”

Harriet reached for the contract and spent five minutes reading through it. Finally she looked up.

“And all three of you are agreed?” she said.

Three heads nodded. Vanger lifted her pen and signed. She shoved the cheque back across the table, and Blomkvist tore it up.

The partners of Millennium had dinner together at Samir’s Cauldron on Tavastgatan. It was a quiet party – to celebrate the new arrangement – with good wine and couscous with lamb. The conversation was relaxed, and Vanger was noticeably dazed. It felt a little like an uncomfortable first date: something is going to happen, but no-one knows exactly what it might be.

Vanger had to leave at 7:30. She excused herself by saying that she had to go to her hotel and get an early night. Berger was heading home to her husband and walked with her some of the way. They parted at Slussen. Blomkvist and Malm stayed on for a while before Malm excused himself and said that he too had to get home.

Vanger took a taxi to the Sheraton and went straight to her room on the eighth floor. She got undressed and had a bath and put on the hotel’s robe. Then she sat at the window and looked out towards Riddarholmen. She took a pack of Dunhills from her bag. She smoked three or four cigarettes a day, so few that she could consider herself a nonsmoker and still enjoy it without a guilty conscience.

At 9:00 there was a knock at the door. She opened it and let Blomkvist in.

“You scoundrel,” she said.

He smiled and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

“I really thought you guys were going to kick me out.”

“We never would have done it like that. Do you understand why we wanted to rewrite the contract?”

“Of course. It makes perfect sense.”

Blomkvist opened her robe and put a hand on her breast, caressing it cautiously.

“You scoundrel,” she said again.

Salander stopped at the door with a nameplate that said WU. She had seen a light from the street, and now she could hear music coming from inside. So Miriam Wu still lived here in the studio apartment on Tomtebogatan near St.Eriksplan. It was Friday evening, and Salander had half hoped that Mimmi would be out having fun somewhere. The only questions that remained to be answered were whether Mimmi still wanted to have anything to do with her and whether she was alone and available.

She rang the bell.

Mimmi opened the door and her eyebrows lifted in surprise. Then she leaned against the doorjamb and put her hand on her hip.

“Salander. I thought you were dead or something.”

“Or something.”

“What do you want?”

“There are many answers to that question.”

Miriam Wu looked around the stairwell before she again fixed her eyes on Salander.

“Try one.”

“Well, I just wanted to see whether you’re still single and might want some company tonight.”

Mimmi looked astonished for a few seconds and then laughed out loud.

“I know only one person who would even dream of ringing my bell after a year and a half’s silence to ask me if I wanted to fuck.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

Mimmi stopped laughing. She was quiet for a few seconds.

“Lisbeth… Jesus, you’re serious.”

Salander waited.

Finally Mimmi sighed and opened the door wide.

“Come on, then. I can at least offer you a coffee.”

Salander followed her in and sat on one of two stools by a small table in the hall. The apartment was about 250 square feet: one cramped room and a hall. The kitchen was little more than a niche for cooking in a corner of the hall. Mimmi had fixed a hose to the sink from the bathroom.

Mimmi’s mother was from Hong Kong, her father from Boden. Salander knew that her parents lived in Paris. Mimmi was studying sociology in Stockholm, and she had an older sister studying anthropology in the States. Her mother’s genes were visible in Mimmi’s raven black hair, cut short, and her slightly Asian features. Her father had given her the clear blue eyes. She had a wide mouth and dimples that did not come from either of her parents.

Mimmi was thirty-one. She liked to dress up in leather and go to clubs where they did performance art – sometimes she appeared in the shows. Salander had not been to a club since she was sixteen.

Besides her studies, Mimmi had a job one day a week as a sales clerk at Domino Fashion on a street off Sveavägen. Customers desperate for outfits such as a rubber nurse’s uniform or black leather witch’s garb frequented Domino, which both designed and manufactured the clothes. Mimmi was part owner of the boutique with some girlfriends, and the shop provided a modest supplement to her student loan of a few thousand kronor each month. Salander had first seen Mimmi when she performed in a show at the Gay Pride Festival a couple of years before and then ran into her in a beer tent later that night. Mimmi had been dressed in an odd lemon yellow plastic dress that revealed more than it concealed. Salander saw nothing erotic about the outfit, but she had been drunk enough to suddenly want to pick up a girl dressed like a lemon. To Salander’s great surprise the citrus fruit had taken one look at her, laughed out loud, kissed her without embarrassment, and said You’re the one I want. They had gone back to Salander’s place and had sex all night long.

“I am what I am,” Salander said. “I ran away from everything and everybody. I should have said goodbye.”

“I thought something had happened to you. Not that we had been in touch that much in the last months you were here.”

“I was busy.”

“You’re such a mystery. You never talk about yourself. I don’t even know where you work or who I could have called when you didn’t answer your mobile.”

“I’m not working anywhere right now, and besides, you’re just like me. You wanted sex but you weren’t particularly interested in a relationship. Or were you?”

“That’s true,” Mimmi said at last.

“And it was the same with me. I never made any promises.”

“You’ve changed,” Mimmi said.

“Not a lot.”

“You look older. More mature. You have different clothes. And you’ve stuffed your bra with something.”

Salander said nothing. Mimmi had seen her naked – of course she would notice the change. In the end she lowered her eyes and mumbled, “I had a boob job.”

“What did you say?”

Salander looked up and raised her voice, unaware that it had taken on a defiant tone.

“I went to a clinic in Italy and had breast implants. That’s why I disappeared. Then I just kept on travelling. Now I’m back.”

“Are you joking?”

Salander looked at Mimmi, expressionless.

“Stupid of me. You never joke about anything, Mr. Spock.”

“I’m not going to apologize. I’m just being honest. If you want me to leave, just say the word.”

Mimmi laughed out loud. “Well, I certainly don’t want you to leave without letting me see how they look. Please.”

“I’ve always liked having sex with you, Mimmi. You didn’t give a damn what sort of work I did, and if I was busy you found somebody else.”

Mimmi nodded. When she was seventeen, after a number of fumbling attempts, she was finally initiated into the mysteries of sex at a party organized in Göteborg by the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights. She had never considered any other lifestyle after that. Once when she was twenty-three she had tried having sex with a man. She mechanically did everything she was expected to do, but it was not enjoyable. She also belonged to the minority within the minority who were not interested in marriage or fidelity or cosy evenings at home.

“I’ve been home for a few weeks. I needed to know if I had to go out and pick somebody up or if you’re still interested.”

Mimmi bent down and kissed her lightly on the lips.

“I was thinking of studying tonight.”

She unbuttoned the top button of Lisbeth’s blouse.

“But what the hell…”

She kissed her again and kept unbuttoning.

“I just have to see this.”

She kissed her again.

“Welcome back.”

Harriet Vanger fell asleep around 2:00 a.m. Blomkvist lay awake listening to her breathing. After a while he got up and filched a Dunhill from the pack in her handbag. He sat in a chair next to the bed and looked at her.

He had not planned to become Harriet Vanger’s lover. Far from it. After his time in Hedestad he wanted more than anything to keep the whole Vanger family at arm’s length. He had seen Harriet at board meetings and kept his distance. They knew each other’s secrets, but apart from Harriet Vanger’s role on Millennium’s board, their dealings were at an end.

During the Whitsuntide vacation the year before, Blomkvist had gone to his cabin in Sandhamn for the first time in several months, to have some peace and quiet and sit on the porch and read crime novels. On the Friday afternoon, he was on his way to the kiosk to buy some cigarettes when he ran into Harriet. She had apparently felt a need to get away from Hedestad herself and had booked a weekend at the hotel in Sandhamn. She had not been there since she was a child. She had been sixteen when she left Sweden and fifty-three when she came back. It was Blomkvist who had tracked her down.

After their surprised greetings, Harriet had lapsed into an awkward silence. Blomkvist knew her history, and she was aware that he had compromised his principles in order to cover up the Vanger family’s horrific secrets. And in part he had done it for her.

Blomkvist invited her to his cabin. He made coffee and they sat on the porch outside for several hours, talking. It was the first time they had talked at length since her return.

Blomkvist could not resist asking: “What did you do with the stuff in Martin’s basement?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“I cleaned it up myself. I burned everything that would burn. I had the house torn down. I couldn’t live there, and I couldn’t sell it and let someone else live there. For me all its associations were with evil. I’m planning another house to take its place, a small cabin.”

“Didn’t people raise their eyebrows when you had the house torn down? It was quite luxurious and modern.”

She smiled. “Dirch Frode put about the story that there was so much damp in the foundation that it would be more expensive to rebuild than to take it down.” Frode was the family’s lawyer.

“How is Frode getting on?”

“He’s going to be seventy soon. I’m keeping him busy.”

They had lunch together, and Blomkvist realized that Harriet Vanger was sitting there telling him the most intimate and private details about her life. When he asked her why, she thought for a moment and said that there really was no-one else in the whole world with whom she could be so open. Besides, it was hard not to open her heart to a kid she had babysat all of forty years ago.

She had had sex with three men in her life. First her father and then her brother. She had killed her father and run away from her brother. Somehow she had survived and met a man with whom she had created a new life for herself.

“He was tender and loving. Dependable and honest. I was happy with him. We had a wonderful twenty years together before he became ill.”

“You never remarried? Why not?”

She shrugged. “I was the mother of two children in Australia and the owner of a big agricultural business. I could never get away for a romantic weekend. And I’ve never missed sex.” They sat quiet for a while. “It’s late. I should be getting back to the hotel.”

Blomkvist made no move to get up.

“Do you want to seduce me?”

“I do,” he said.

He stood up and took her hand, leading her into the cabin and up to the sleeping loft. Suddenly she stopped him. “I don’t really know how. This is not something I do every day.”

They spent the whole weekend together and then one night every three months after the magazine’s board meetings. It was not a relationship that could be sustained. She worked around the clock and was very often travelling, and every other month she was in Australia. But she had come to value her occasional rendezvous with Blomkvist.

Mimmi made coffee two hours later as Salander lay naked and sweaty on top of the bedclothes. She smoked a cigarette and watched Mimmi through the doorway. She envied Mimmi’s body. She was impressively muscled. She worked out at a gym three evenings a week, one of them doing Thai boxing or some sort of karate shit, and this had given her body an awesome shape.

She was just delicious. Not beautiful like a model, but genuinely attractive. She loved to provoke and flirt. When she dressed up for a party she could get anyone whatsoever interested in her. Salander did not understand why Mimmi cared about a goose like her. But she was glad she did. Sex with Mimmi was so dramatically liberating that Salander just relaxed and enjoyed it, taking what she wanted for herself and giving in return.

Mimmi came back and put two mugs on a stool beside the bed. She crawled onto the bed and leaned over to nibble at one of Salander’s nipples.

“They’ll do,” she said.

Salander said nothing. She looked at Mimmi’s breasts. Mimmi’s breasts were small too, but they looked completely natural on her body.

“If I’m going to be honest, Lisbeth, you look fantastic.”

“That’s silly. My breasts don’t really make any difference one way or the other, but at least I’ve got some now.”

“You’re so hung up about your body.”

“You’re one to talk, working out like an idiot.”

“I work out like an idiot because I like to work out. It’s a kick, almost as good as sex. You ought to try it.”

“I do some boxing.”

“Bullshit – you boxed once a month max. And mostly because you got a buzz out of smacking those snotty guys around. That’s not the same as working out to feel good.”

Salander shrugged. Mimmi sat straddling her.

“Lisbeth, you’re so obsessed. You should know by now that I like having you in bed not because of how you look but because of the way you act. I think you’re sexy as hell.”

“You too. That’s why I kept coming back.”

“Not for love?” Mimmi said, pretending to be hurt.

Salander shook her head.

“Are you seeing somebody?”

Mimmi hesitated a moment before she nodded.

“Maybe. In a way. Possibly. It’s a little complicated.”

“I’m not snooping.”

“I know, but I don’t mind telling you. It’s someone at the university who’s a little older than me. She’s been married twenty years, but her husband travels a lot, so we get together when he’s not around. Suburbs, villa, all that. She’s a closet dyke. It’s been going on since last autumn and it’s getting a bit boring. But she’s really luscious. And then I hang out with the usual gang, of course.”

“I was just wondering whether I could come and see you again.”

“I’d really like to hear from you.”

“Even if I disappear for another six months?”

“Just keep in touch. I’d like to know if you’re dead or alive. And in any case I’ll remember your birthday.”

“No strings?”

Mimmi sighed and smiled.

“You know, you’re a dyke I could imagine living with. You’d leave me alone when I wanted to be left alone.”

Salander said nothing.

“Apart from the fact that you’re not really a dyke. You’re probably bisexual. But most of all you’re sexual – you like sex and you don’t care about what gender. You’re an entropic chaos factor.”

“I don’t know what I am,” Salander said. “But I’m in Stockholm now and pretty bad at relationships. In fact, I don’t know one single person here. You’re the first person I’ve talked to since I got home.”

Mimmi studied her with a serious expression.

“Do you really want to know people? You’re the most secretive and unapproachable person I know. But your breasts really are luscious.” She put her fingers under one nipple and stretched the skin. “They fit you. Not too big and not too small.”

Salander sighed with relief that the reviews were satisfactory.

“And they feel real.”

She squeezed the breast so hard that Salander gasped. They looked at each other. Then Mimmi bent and gave Salander a deep kiss. Salander responded and threw her arms around Mimmi. The coffee was left to get cold.

CHAPTER 7

At around 11:00 on Saturday morning, a car drove into Svavelsjö between Järna and Vagnhärad – the community consisted of no more than fifteen buildings – and stopped in front of the last building, about 500 feet outside the village proper. It was a tumbledown industrial structure that had once been a printing factory but now had a sign over the main door identifying it as Svavelsjö Motorcycle Club. There was no other car in sight. Nevertheless the driver looked around carefully before he got out of his car. He was huge and blond. The air was cold. He put on brown leather gloves and took a black sports bag from the trunk.

He was not worried about being observed. It would be impossible to park close to the old printing factory without being seen. If any police or government unit wanted to keep the building under surveillance, they would have to equip their people with camouflage and telescopes and dig them in at the far end of a field. Inevitably that would be talked about by the villagers, and three of the houses were owned by Svavelsjö MC members.

On the other hand, he did not want to go inside the building. The police had raided the clubhouse on several occasions, and no-one could be sure whether or not bugging equipment had been hidden there. This meant that conversation inside was pretty much about cars, girls, and beer, and sometimes about which stocks were good to invest in.

So the man waited until Carl-Magnus Lundin came out to the yard. Magge Lundin was club president. He was tall with a slim build, but over time he had acquired a hefty beer belly. He was only thirty-six. He had dark blond hair in a ponytail and wore black jeans, boots, and a heavy winter jacket. He had five counts on his police record. Two of them were for minor drug offences, one for receiving stolen goods, and one for stealing a car and drunk driving. The fifth charge, the most serious, had sent him to prison for a year: it was for grievous bodily harm when, several years ago, he had gone berserk in a bar in Stockholm.

Lundin and his huge visitor shook hands and walked slowly along the fence around the yard.

“It’s been a few months,” Lundin said.

The man said: “We’ve got a deal going down. 3,060 grams of methamphetamine.”

“Same terms as last time?”

“Fifty-fifty.”

Lundin pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. He liked doing business with the giant. Meth brought a street price of between 160 and 230 kronor per gram, depending on availability. So 3,060 grams would yield a cut value of about 600,000 kronor. Svavelsjö MC would distribute the three kilos in batches of about 250 grams each to known dealers. At that stage the price would drop to somewhere between 120 and 130 kronor per gram.

It was an exceptionally attractive deal for Svavelsjö MC. Unlike deals with other suppliers, there was never any crap about advance payment or fixed prices. The blond giant supplied the goods and demanded 50 percent, an entirely reasonable share of the revenue. They knew more or less what a kilo of meth would bring in. The exact amount depended on to what extent Lundin could get away with cutting the stuff. It could vary by a few thousand one way or the other, but when the deal was done the giant would collect around 190,000 kronor.

They had done a lot of business together over the years, always using the same system. Lundin knew that the giant could have doubled his take by handling the distribution himself. He also knew why the man accepted a lower profit: he could stay in the background and let Svavelsjö MC have all the risk. He made a smaller but a safer income. And unlike with all other suppliers he had ever come across, it was a relationship that was based on sound business principles, credit, and goodwill. No hassle, no bullshit, and no threats.

The giant had also swallowed a loss of almost 100,000 kronor over a weapons delivery that went bust. Lundin knew no-one else in the business who could absorb a loss like that. He was terrified when he’d had to tell him. Lundin explained how the deal had gone sour and how a policeman at the Crime Prevention Centre might be about to make a big score off a member of the Aryan Brotherhood in Värmland. But the giant had not so much as raised an eyebrow. He was almost sympathetic. Shit happens. The whole delivery had to be written off.

Lundin was not without talents. He understood that a smaller, less risky profit was good business.

He had never once considered double-crossing the giant. That would be bad form. The giant and his associates settled for a lower profit so long as the accounting was honest. If he cheated the blond, he would come calling, and Lundin was convinced that he would not survive such a visit.

“When can you deliver?”

The giant dropped his sports bag to the ground.

“Delivery has been made.”

Lundin did not feel like opening the bag to check the contents. Instead he reached out his hand as a sign that they had a deal and he intended to do his part.

“There’s one more thing,” the giant said.

“What’s that?”

“We’d like to put a special job your way.”

“Let’s hear it.”

He pulled an envelope out of his inside jacket pocket and gave it to Lundin, who opened it and took out a passport photograph and a sheet of A4 containing personal data. He raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

“Her name is Lisbeth Salander and she lives in Stockholm, on Lundagatan in Södermalm.”

“Right.”

“She’s probably out of the country at present, but she’ll turn up sooner or later.”

“OK.”

“My employer would like to have a quiet talk with her. She has to be delivered alive. We suggest that warehouse near Yngern. And we need someone to clean up afterwards. She has to disappear without a trace.”

“We should be able to handle that. How will we know when she’s home?”

“I’ll tell you.”

“And the price?”

“What do you say to ten thousand for the whole job? It’s pretty straightforward. Drive to Stockholm, pick her up, deliver her to me.”

They shook hands again.

On her second visit to Lundagatan, Salander flopped down on the lumpy sofa to think. She had to make a number of decisions, and one of these was whether or not she should keep the apartment.

She lit a cigarette, blew smoke up towards the ceiling, and tapped the ash into an empty Coke can.

She had no reason to love this apartment. She had moved in with her mother and her sister when she was four. Her mother had slept in the living room, and she and Camilla shared the tiny bedroom. When she was twelve and “All The Evil” happened, she was moved to a children’s clinic and then, when she was fifteen, to the first in a series of foster families. The apartment had been rented out by her trustee, Holger Palmgren, who had also seen to it that it was returned to her when she turned eighteen and needed a place to live.

The apartment had been a fixed point for almost all of her life. Although she no longer needed it, she did not like the idea of selling it. That would mean strangers in her space.

The logistical problem was that all her mail – insofar as she received any at all – came to Lundagatan. If she got rid of the apartment she would have to find another address to use. Salander did not want to be an official entry in all the databases. In this regard she was almost paranoid. She had no reason to trust the authorities, or anyone else for that matter.

She looked out at the firewall of the back courtyard, as she had done her whole life. She was suddenly glad of her decision to leave the apartment. She had never felt safe there. Every time she turned onto Lundagatan and approached the street door – sober or not – she had been acutely aware of her surroundings, of parked cars and passersby She felt sure that somewhere out there were people who wished her harm, and they would most probably attack her as she came or went from the apartment.

There had been no attack. But that did not mean that she could relax. The address on Lundagatan was on every public register and database, and in all those years she had never had the means to improve her security; she could only stay on her guard. Now the situation was different. She did not want anyone to know her new address in Mosebacke. Instinct warned her to remain as anonymous as possible.

But that did not solve the problem of what to do with the old apartment. She brooded about it for a while and then took out her mobile and called Mimmi.

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Hi, Lisbeth. So you make contact after only a week this time?”

“I’m at Lundagatan.”

“OK.”

“I was wondering if you’d like to take over the apartment.”

“What do you mean?”

“You live in a shoebox.”

“I like my shoebox. Are you moving?”

“It’s empty here.”

Mimmi seemed to hesitate at the other end of the line.

“Lisbeth, I can’t afford it.”

“It’s a housing association apartment and it’s all paid off. The rent is 1,480 a month, which must be less than you’re paying for the shoebox. And the rent has been paid for a year.”

“But are you thinking of selling it? I mean, it must be worth quite a bit.”

“About one and a half million, if you can believe the estate agents’ ads.”

“I can’t afford that.”

“I’m not selling. You could move in here tonight, you can live here as long as you like, and you won’t have to pay anything for a year. I’m not allowed to rent it out, but I can write you into my agreement as my roommate. That way you won’t have any hassle with the housing association.”

“But Lisbeth – are you proposing to me?” Mimmi laughed.

“I’m not using the apartment and I don’t want to sell it.”

“You mean I could live there for free, girl? Are you serious?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“As long as you like. Are you interested?”

“Of course I am. I don’t get offered a free apartment in the middle of Söder every day of the week.”

“There’s a catch.”

“I thought as much.”

“You can live here as long as you like, but I’ll still be listed as resident and I’ll get my mail here. All you have to do is take in the mail and let me know if anything interesting turns up.”

“Lisbeth, you’re the freakiest. Where are you going to live?”

“We’ll talk about that later,” Salander said.

They agreed to meet that afternoon so that Mimmi could have a proper look at the apartment. Salander was already in a much better mood. She walked down to Handelsbanken on Hornsgatan, where she took a number and waited her turn.

She showed her ID and explained that she had been abroad for some time and wanted to know the balance of her savings account. The sum was 82,670 kronor. The account had been dormant for more than a year, and one deposit of 9,312 kronor had been made the previous autumn. That was the inheritance from her mother.

Salander withdrew 9,312 kronor. She wanted to spend the money on something that would have made her mother happy. She walked to the post office on Rosenlundsgatan and sent an anonymous deposit to one of Stockholm’s crisis centres for women.

It was 8:00 on Friday evening when Berger shut down her computer and stretched. She had spent nine hours solid putting the finishing touches on the March issue of Millennium, and since Eriksson was working full-time on Svensson’s themed issue she had had to do a good part of the editing herself. Cortez and Karim had helped out, but they were primarily writers and researchers, and not used to editing.

So she was tired and her back ached, but she was satisfied both with the day and with life in general. The accountant’s graphs were pointing in the right direction, articles were coming in on time, or at least not unmanageably late, and the staff was happy. After more than a year, they were still on a high from the adrenaline rush of the Wennerström affair.

After trying for a while to massage her neck, Berger decided she needed a shower and thought about using the one in the office bathroom. But she felt too lazy and put her feet up on the desk instead. She was going to turn forty-five in three months, and that famous future she had longed for was starting to be a thing of the past. She had developed a network of tiny wrinkles and lines around her eyes and mouth, but she knew that she still looked good. She worked out at the gym twice a week, but she had noticed it was getting more difficult to climb the mast during her long sailing trips. And she was the one who always had to do the climbing – her husband had terrible vertigo.

Berger reflected that her first forty-five years, despite a number of ups and downs, had been by and large successful. She had money, status, a home which gave her great pleasure, and a job she enjoyed. She had a tenderhearted husband who loved her and with whom she was still in love after fifteen years of marriage. And on the side she had a pleasant and seemingly inexhaustible lover, who might not satisfy her soul but who did satisfy her body when she needed it.

She smiled as she thought of Blomkvist. She wondered when he was going to come clean and tell her that he was sleeping with Harriet Vanger. Neither of them had breathed a word about their relationship, but Berger wasn’t born yesterday. At the board meeting in August she had noticed a glance that passed between them. Out of sheer cussedness she had tried both of their mobile numbers later that evening, and both were turned off. That was hardly watertight evidence, of course, but after subsequent board meetings Blomkvist was always unavailable in the evening. It was almost comical to watch the way Vanger would leave after dinner with the same excuse – that she had to go to bed early. Berger did not pry, and she was not jealous. On the other hand, she would certainly tease them both about it at some suitable occasion.

She never got involved in Blomkvist’s affairs with other women, but she hoped that his affair with Vanger would not give rise to problems on the board. Yet she was not really worried. Blomkvist had all manner of terminated relationships behind him, and he was still on friendly terms with most of the women involved.

Berger was incredibly happy to be Blomkvist’s friend and confidante. In certain ways he was a fool, and in others so insightful that he seemed like an oracle. But he had never understood her love for her husband, had never been able to grasp why she considered Greger Beckman such an enchanting person: warm, exciting, generous, and above all without many of the traits that she so detested in most men. Beckman was the man she wanted to grow old with. She had wanted to have children with him, but it had not been possible and now it was too late. But in her choice of a life partner she could not imagine a better or more stable person – someone she could so completely and wholeheartedly trust and who was always there for her when she needed him.

Blomkvist was very different. He was a man with such shifting traits that he sometimes appeared to have multiple personalities. As a professional he was obstinate and almost pathologically focused on the job at hand. He took hold of a story and worked his way forward to the point where it approached perfection, and then he tied up all the loose ends. When he was at his best he was brilliant, and when he was not at his best he was still far better than the average. He seemed to have an almost intuitive gift for deciding which story was hiding a skeleton in the closet and which story would turn into a dull, run-of-the-mill piece. She had never regretted working with him.

Nor had she ever regretted becoming his lover.

The only person who understood Berger’s passion for sex with Blomkvist was her husband, and he understood it because she dared to discuss her needs with him. It was not a matter of infidelity, but of desire. Sex with Blomkvist gave her a kick that no other man was able to give her, including her husband.

Sex was important to her. She had lost her virginity when she was fourteen and spent a great part of her teenage years in a frustrated search for fulfilment. She had tried everything, from heavy petting with classmates and an awkward affair with a teacher to phone sex and fetishism. She had experimented with most of what interested her in eroticism. She had toyed with bondage and been a member of Club Xtreme, which arranged parties of the kind that were not socially acceptable. On several occasions she had tried sex with other women and, disappointed, admitted that it simply was not her thing and that women could not excite her even a fraction as much as a man could. Or two. With Beckman she had explored sex with two men – one of them a famous gallery owner – and discovered both that her mate had a strong bisexual inclination and that she herself was almost paralyzed with pleasure at feeling two men simultaneously caressing and satisfying her, just as she experienced a sense of pleasure that was difficult to define when she watched her husband being caressed by another man. She and Beckman had repeated that excitement with the same success with a couple of regular partners.

It was not that her sex life with her husband was boring or unsatisfying. It was just that Blomkvist gave her a completely different experience.

He had talent. He was quite simply so good that it felt as if she had achieved the optimal balance with Beckman as husband and Blomkvist as lover-when-needed. She could not do without either of them, and she had no intention of choosing between them.

And this was what her husband had understood, that she had a need beyond what he could offer her, even in the form of his most imaginative acrobatic exercises in the Jacuzzi.

What Berger liked best about her relationship with Blomkvist was the fact that he had no desire whatsoever to control her. He was not the least bit jealous, and even though she herself had had several attacks of jealousy when they first began to go out together twenty years ago, she had discovered that in his case she did not need to be jealous. Their relationship was built on friendship, and in matters of friendship he was boundlessly loyal. It was a relationship that would survive the harshest tests.

But it bothered her that so many of her acquaintances still whispered about her relationship with Blomkvist, and always behind her back.

Blomkvist was a man. He could go from bed to bed without anyone raising their eyebrows. She was a woman, and the fact that she had a lover, and with her husband’s consent – coupled with the fact that she had also been true to her lover for twenty years – resulted in the most interesting dinner conversations.

She thought for a moment and then picked up the phone to call her husband.

“Hi, darling. What are you doing?”

“Writing.”

Beckman was not just an artist; he was most of all a professor of art history and the author of several books. He often participated in public debate, and he acted as consultant to several large architecture firms. For the past year he had been working on a book about the artistic decoration of buildings and its influence, and why people prospered in some buildings but not in others. The book had begun to develop into an attack on functionalism which (Berger suspected) would cause a furor.

“How’s it going?”

“Good. It’s flowing. How about you?”

“I just finished the latest issue. It’s going to the printer on Thursday.”

“Well done.”

“I’m wiped out.”

“It sounds like you’ve got something in mind.”

“Have you planned anything for tonight? Would you be terribly upset if I didn’t come home?”

“Say hello to Blomkvist and tell him he’s tempting fate,” said Beckman.

“He might like that.”

“OK. Then tell him that you’re a witch who’s impossible to satisfy and he’ll end up aging prematurely.”

“He knows that.”

“In that case all that’s left for me is to commit suicide. I’m going to keep writing until I pass out. Have a good time.”

Blomkvist was at Svensson and Johansson’s place in Enskede, wrapping up a discussion about some details in Svensson’s manuscript. She wondered if he was busy tonight, or would he consider giving a massage to an aching back.

“You’ve got the keys,” he said. “Make yourself at home.”

“I will. See you in an hour or so.”

It took her ten minutes to walk to Bellmansgatan. She undressed and showered and made espresso. Then she crawled into bed and waited naked and full of anticipation.

The optimum gratification for her would probably be a threesome with her husband and Blomkvist, and that would never happen. Blomkvist was so straight that she liked to tease him about being a homophobe. He had zero interest in men. Apparently you could not get everything you wanted in this world.

The blond giant frowned in irritation as he manoeuvred the car at ten miles an hour along a forest road in such bad repair that for a while he thought he must have taken a wrong turn. It was just beginning to get dark when the road finally widened and he caught sight of the cabin. He stopped, turned off the engine, and took a look around. He had about fifty yards to go.

He was in the region of Stallarholmen, not far from the town of Mariefred. It was a simple 1950s cabin in the middle of the woods. Through a line of trees he could see a strip of ice on Lake Mälaren.

He could not imagine why anyone would want to spend their free time in such an isolated place. He felt suddenly uncomfortable when he shut the car door behind him. The forest seemed threatening, as if it were closing in around him. He sensed that he was being watched. He started towards the cabin, but he heard a rustling that made him stop short.

He stared into the woods. It was dusk, silent with no wind. He stood there for two minutes with his nerves on full alert before, seeing it out of the corner of his eye, he realized that a figure was silently, slowly moving in the trees. When his eyes focused, he saw that the figure was standing perfectly still about thirty yards into the forest, staring at him.

He felt a vague panic. He tried to make out details. He saw a dark, bony face. It appeared to be a dwarf, no more than half his own size, and dressed in something that looked like a tunic of pine branches and moss. A forest troll? A leprechaun?

He held his breath. He felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

Then he blinked six times and shook his head. When he looked again the creature had moved about ten yards to the right. There was nobody there. He knew that he was imagining things. And yet he could so clearly make out the figure in the trees. Suddenly it moved and came closer. It seemed to be lurching in a semicircle to get into a position to attack him.

The blond giant hurried to the cabin. He knocked a little too hard on the door. As soon as he heard voices within, his panic subsided. He looked over his shoulder. There was nothing there.

But he did not breathe out until the door opened. Bjurman greeted him courteously and invited him in.

Miriam Wu was panting when she arrived back upstairs after dragging the last trash bag of Salander’s possessions down to the recycling room in the cellar. The apartment was clinically clean and smelled of soap, paint, and freshly brewed coffee made by Salander. She was sitting on a stool, gazing thoughtfully at the bare rooms from which curtains, rugs, discount coupons on the refrigerator, and her usual junk in the hall had vanished as if by magic. She was amazed at how much bigger the apartment seemed.

Mimmi and Salander did not have the same taste in clothes, furniture, or intellectual stimulation. Correction: Mimmi had taste and definite views on how she wanted her living quarters to look, what kind of furniture she wanted, and what sort of clothes one should wear. Salander had no taste whatsoever, Mimmi realized.

After she had inspected the apartment on Lundagatan as closely as an estate agent might, they had discussed things and Mimmi had decided that most of the stuff had to go. Especially the disgusting dirt-brown sofa in the living room. Did Salander want to keep any of the things? No. Then Mimmi had spent a few long days as well as several hours each evening for two weeks throwing out bits of old furniture, cleaning cupboards, scrubbing the floor, scouring the bathtub, and repainting the walls in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and hall. She also varnished the parquet floor in the living room.

Salander had no interest in such tasks, but she came several times to watch Mimmi at work, fascinated. Eventually the apartment was empty of everything except for a kitchen table of solid wood, much the worse for wear, that Mimmi intended to sand down and refinish, two stools that Salander had pounced on when an attic in the building was cleared, and a set of sturdy shelves in the living room that Mimmi thought she could repaint.

“I’m moving in this weekend, unless you’re going to change your mind.”

“I don’t need the apartment.”

“But it’s a great apartment. I mean, there are bigger and better apartments, but it’s slap in the middle of Söder and the rent is nothing. Lisbeth, you’re passing up a fortune by not selling it.”

“I have enough to get by.”

Mimmi shut up, not sure how to interpret Salander’s brusque dismissal.

“Where are you living now?”

Salander did not reply.

“Could a person come and visit you?”

“Not right now.”

Salander opened her shoulder bag, took out some papers, and passed them over to Mimmi.

“I’ve fixed the agreement with the housing association. The simplest thing is to register you as my roommate and say I’m selling half of the apartment to you. The price is one krona. You have to sign the contract.”

Mimmi took the pen and signed the contract, adding her date of birth.

“Is that all?”

“That’s it.”

“Lisbeth, I’ve always thought that you were a little weird. Do you realize that you just gave away half of this apartment to me? I’d love to have the apartment, but I don’t want to end up in a situation where you suddenly regret it or it causes bad feelings between us.”

“There will never be any bad feelings. I want you to live here. It feels right to me.”

“But with nothing in return? You’re nuts.”

“You’re taking care of my mail. That’s the deal.”

“That’ll take me an average of four seconds a week. Do you intend to come over once in a while to have sex?”

Salander fixed her eyes on Mimmi. She was quiet for a moment.

“I’d like to very much, but it’s not part of the contract. You can say no whenever you want.”

Mimmi sighed. “And here I was just beginning to enjoy being a kept woman. You know, having somebody who gives me an apartment and pays my rent and comes over now and then to wrestle around in bed.”

They sat in silence for a while. Then Mimmi stood up resolutely and went into the living room to turn off the bare bulb in the ceiling fixture.

“Come here.”

Salander followed her.

“I’ve never had sex on the floor of a newly painted apartment with almost no furniture. I saw a movie with Marlon Brando once about a couple in Paris who did it.”

Salander glanced at the floor.

“I feel like playing. Are you up for it?” Mimmi said.

“I’m almost always up for it.”

“Tonight I think I’ll be a dominating bitch. I get to make the decisions. Take off your clothes.”

Salander smiled a crooked smile. She took off her clothes. It took at least ten seconds.

“Lie down on the floor. On your stomach.”

Salander did as Mimmi commanded. The parquet floor was cool and her skin got goose bumps immediately. Mimmi used Salander’s T-shirt with the slogan YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO REMAIN SILENT to tie her hands behind her back.

Salander could not help thinking that this was similar to the way Nils Fucking Slimebag Bjurman had tied her up two years ago.

The similarities ended there.

With Mimmi, Salander felt only lustful anticipation. She was compliant when Mimmi rolled her over on her back and spread her legs. Salander watched her in the dim room as she pulled off her own T-shirt, and was fascinated by her soft breasts. Then Mimmi tied her T-shirt as a blindfold over Salander’s eyes. She could hear the rustle of clothes. A few seconds later she felt Mimmi’s tongue on her belly and her fingers on the inside of her thighs. She was more excited than she had been in a long time. She shut her eyes tight beneath the blindfold and let Mimmi set the pace.

CHAPTER 8

Armansky looked up when he heard the light knock on the doorjamb and saw Salander in the doorway. She was balancing two cups from the espresso machine. He put down his pen and pushed the report away.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi.”

“This is a social call,” she said. “May I come in?”

Armansky closed his eyes for a second. Then he pointed at the visitor’s chair. He glanced at the clock. It was 6:30 in the evening. Salander gave him one of the cups and sat down. They took stock of each other for a moment.

“More than a year,” Armansky said.

Salander nodded.

“Are you mad?”

“Should I be?”

“I didn’t say goodbye.”

Armansky pursed his lips. He was shocked to see her, but at the same time relieved to discover that at least she wasn’t dead. He suddenly felt a strong sense of irritation and weariness.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “You don’t have any obligation to tell me what you’re working on. What do you want?”

His voice sounded cooler than he had intended.

“I’m not sure. I mostly just wanted to say hello.”

“Do you need a job? I’m not going to employ you again.”

She shook her head.

“Are you working somewhere else?”

She shook her head again. She seemed to be trying to formulate her words. Armansky waited.

“I’ve been travelling,” she said at last. “I’m only recently back.”

Armansky studied her. There was a new kind of… maturity in her choice of clothes and her bearing. And she had stuffed her bra with something.

“You’ve changed. Where have you been?”

“Here and there…” she said, but when she saw his annoyance she added, “I went to Italy and kept going, to the Middle East, to Hong Kong via Bangkok. I was in Australia for a while and New Zealand, and I island-hopped my way across the Pacific. I was in Tahiti for a month. Then I travelled through the U.S. and I spent the last few months in the Caribbean. I don’t know why I didn’t say goodbye.”

“I’ll tell you why: because you don’t give a shit about other people,” Armansky said matter-of-factly.

Salander bit her lower lip. “Usually it’s other people who don’t give a shit about me.”

“Bullshit,” Armansky said. “You’ve got an attitude problem and you treat people like dirt when they’re trying to be your friends. It’s that simple.”

Silence.

“Do you want me to leave?”

“You do as you like. You always have. But if you leave now I never want to see you again.”

Salander was suddenly afraid. Someone she respected was about to reject her. She did not know what to say.

“It’s been two years since Holger Palmgren had his stroke. You haven’t once visited him,” Armansky went on relentlessly.

Salander stared at Armansky, shocked. “Palmgren is alive?”

“You don’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”

“The doctors said that he –”

“The doctors said a lot about him,” Armansky interrupted. “He was in a very bad way and couldn’t communicate with anyone. But in the last year he’s recovered quite a bit. He doesn’t articulate too well – you have to listen carefully to understand what he’s saying. He needs help with a lot of things, but he can go to the toilet by himself. People who care about him call in to spend time with him.”

Salander sat dumbfounded. She was the one who had found Palmgren after he had his stroke two years earlier. She had called the ambulance and the doctors had shaken their heads and said that the prognosis was not encouraging. She had lived at the hospital for three days until a doctor told her that Palmgren was in a coma and it was extremely unlikely that he would come out of it. She had stood up and left the hospital without looking back. And obviously without checking to find out what had happened.

She frowned. She had had Nils Bjurman foisted on her at the same time, and he had absorbed a lot of her attention. But nobody, not even Armansky, had told her that Palmgren was still alive, or that he was getting better. She had never considered that possibility.

Her eyes filled with tears. Never in her life had she felt like such a selfish shit. And never had she been savaged in such a furious manner. She bowed her head.

They sat in silence until Armansky said, “How are you doing?”

Salander shrugged.

“How are you making a living? Do you have work?”

“No, I don’t, and I don’t know what kind of work I want. But I’ve got a certain amount of money, so I’m getting by.”

Armansky scrutinized her with searching eyes.

“I just came by to say hello… I’m not looking for a job. I don’t know… maybe I’d do a job for you if you need me sometime, but it would have to be something that interests me.”

“I don’t suppose you want to tell me what happened up in Hedestad last year.”

Salander did not answer.

“Well, something happened. Martin Vanger drove his car into a truck after you’d been back here to borrow surveillance gear, and somebody threatened you. And his sister came back from the dead. It was a sensation, to put it mildly.”

“I’ve given my word I wouldn’t talk about it.”

“And you don’t want to tell me what role you played in the Wennerström affair either.”

“I helped Kalle Blomkvist with research.” Her voice was suddenly much cooler. “That was all. I didn’t want to get involved.”

“Blomkvist has been looking for you high and low. He’s called here once a month to ask if I’ve heard anything from you.”

Salander remained silent, but Armansky saw that her lips were now pressed into a tight line.

“I can’t say that I like him,” Armansky said. “But he cares about you too. I met him once last autumn. He didn’t want to talk about Hedestad either.”

Salander did not want to discuss Blomkvist. “I just came to say hello and tell you that I’m back. I don’t know if I’ll be staying. This is my mobile number and my new email address if you need to get hold of me.”

She handed Armansky a piece of paper and stood up. She was already at the door when he called after her.

“Wait a second. What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to say hello to Holger Palmgren.”

“OK. But I mean… what kind of work will you be doing?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you have to make a living.”

“I told you, I have enough to get by.”

Armansky leaned back in his chair. He was never quite sure how to interpret her words.

“I’ve been so fucking angry that you vanished without a word that I almost decided never to trust you again.” He made a face. “You’re so unreliable. But you’re a damned good researcher. I might have a job coming up that would be a good fit for you.”

She shook her head, but she came back to his desk.

“I don’t want a job from you. I mean, I don’t need one. I’m serious. I’m financially independent.”

Armansky frowned.

“OK, you’re financially independent, whatever that means. I’ll take your word for it. But when you need a job…”

“Dragan, you’re the second person I’ve visited since I got home. I don’t need your work. But for several years now you’ve been one of the few people that I respect.”

“Everybody has to make a living.”

“Sorry, but I’m no longer interested in doing personal investigations. Let me know if you run into a really interesting problem.”

“What sort of problem?”

“The kind you can’t make heads or tails of. If you get stuck and don’t know what to do. If I’m going to do a job for you, you’ll have to come up with something special. Maybe on the operations side.”

“Operations side? You? But you disappear without a trace whenever you feel like it.”

“I’ve never skipped out on a job that I agreed to do.”

Armansky looked at her helplessly. The term operations was jargon, but it meant field work. It could be anything from bodyguard duty to surveillance assignments for art exhibitions. His operations personnel were confident, stable veterans, many of them with a police background, and 90 percent of them were men. Salander was the polar opposite of all the criteria he had set out for personnel in the operations unit of Milton Security.

“Well…” he said dubiously, but she had vanished out the door. Armansky shook his head. She’s weird. She’s really weird.

The next second Salander was back in the doorway.

“Oh, by the way… You’ve had two guys spending a month protecting that actress Christine Rutherford from the nutcase who writes her threatening letters. You think it’s an inside job because the letter writer knows so many details about her.”

Armansky stared at Salander. An electric shock went through him. She’s done it again. She’s flung out a line about a case she absolutely cannot know a thing about.

“So…?”

“It’s a fake. She and her boyfriend have been writing the letters as a publicity stunt. She’s going to get another letter in the next few days, and they’ll leak it to the media next week. They’ll probably accuse Milton of leaking it. Cross her off your client list now.”

Before Armansky could say anything she was gone. He stared at the empty doorway. She could not possibly have known a single detail of the case. She must have an insider at Milton who kept her updated. But only four or five people apart from himself knew about it – the operations chief and the few people who reported on the threats – and they were all stable pros. Armansky rubbed his chin.

He looked down at his desk. The Rutherford file was locked inside it. The office had a burglar alarm. He glanced at the clock again and realized that Harry Fransson, chief of the technical department, would have finished for the day. He started up his email and sent a message asking Fransson to come to his office the following morning to install a surveillance camera.

Salander walked straight home to Mosebacke. She hurried because she had a feeling it was urgent.

She called the hospital in Söder and after some stalling from the switchboard managed to find out Palmgren’s whereabouts. For the past fourteen months he had been in a rehabilitation home in Ersta. All of a sudden she had a vision of Äppelviken. When she called she was told that he was asleep, but that she was welcome to visit him the next day.

Salander spent the evening pacing back and forth in her apartment. She was in a foul mood. She went to bed early and fell asleep almost at once. She woke at 7:00 a.m., showered, and had breakfast at the 7-Eleven. At 8:00 she walked to the car rental agency on Ringvägen. I’ve got to get my own car. She rented the same Nissan Micra she had driven to Äppelviken a few weeks earlier.

She was unaccountably nervous when she parked near the rehabilitation centre, but she gathered up her courage and went inside.

The woman at the front desk consulted her papers and explained that Holger Palmgren was in the gym for therapy just then and would not be available until after 11:00. Salander was welcome to take a seat in the waiting room or come back later. She went and sat in the car and smoked three cigarettes while she waited. At 11:00 she went back to the front desk. She was told to go to the dining hall, down the corridor to the right and then to the left.

She stopped in the doorway and recognized Palmgren in the half-empty dining room. He sat facing her, but was focusing all his attention on his plate. He held his fork in an awkward grip and steered the food to his mouth with great concentration. Every third time or so he missed and the food fell off the fork.

He looked shrunken; he might be a hundred years old. His face seemed strangely immobile. He was sitting in a wheelchair. Only then did Salander take it in that he was alive, that Armansky had not just been punishing her.

Palmgren swore silently as he tried for the third time to spear a bite of macaroni and cheese onto his fork. He was resigned to being unable to walk properly, and he accepted that there was a great deal he would be unable to do. But he hated not being able to eat properly and the fact that sometimes he drooled like a baby.

He knew exactly what it was he should do: lower the fork at the right angle, push it forward, lift it, and guide it to his mouth. The problem was with the coordination. His hand had a life of its own. When he instructed it to lift, it would slide slowly to the side of the plate. If he did manage to steer it towards his mouth, it would often change direction at the last moment and land on his cheek or his chin.

But the rehabilitation was producing results. Six months earlier his hand would shake so much that he could not get a single spoonful into his mouth. His meals might still be taking a long time, but at least he was eating by himself, and he was going to go on working at it until he once again had full control over his limbs.

As he lowered his fork to collect another mouthful, a hand appeared from behind him and gently took it from him. He watched as the fork shovelled up some of the macaroni and cheese and raised it. He thought he knew the thin, doll-like hand and turned his head to meet Salander’s eyes. Her gaze was expectant. She seemed anxious.

For a long moment Palmgren stared at her face. His heart was suddenly pounding in a most unreasonable way. Then he opened his mouth and accepted the food.

She fed him one bite at a time. Normally Palmgren hated being spoon-fed, but he understood Salander’s need. It was not because he was a helpless piece of baggage. She was feeding him as a gesture of humility – in her case an extraordinarily rare occurrence. She put the right-size portions on the fork and waited until he was finished chewing. When he pointed at the glass of milk with the straw, she held it up so he could drink.

When he had swallowed the last mouthful, she put the fork down and gave him a questioning look. He shook his head. They had not said a word to each other during the entire meal.

Palmgren leaned back in his wheelchair and took a deep breath. Salander picked up the napkin and wiped around his mouth. He felt like a Mafia boss in an American movie where a capo di tutti capi was showing respect. He imagined how she would kiss his hand and smiled at the absurdity of this fantasy.

“Do you think it would be possible to get a cup of coffee in this place?” she said.

He slurred his words. His lips and tongue could not shape the sounds.

“Srvg tab rond corn.” The serving table is around the corner, she worked it out.

“You want a cup? Milk, no sugar, as always?”

He signalled yes with a hand. She carried his tray away and came back a minute later with two cups of coffee. He noticed that she drank hers black, which was unusual. He smiled when he saw that she had saved the straw from his milk for the coffee cup. Palmgren had a thousand things to say but he could not formulate a single syllable. But their eyes kept meeting, time after time. Salander looked terribly guilty. Finally she broke the silence.

“I thought you’d died,” she said. “If I’d known you were alive I would never have… I would have come to see you a long time ago. Forgive me.”

He bowed his head. He smiled, a twist of the lips.

“You were in a coma when I left you and the doctors told me you were going to die. They said you would be dead within a few days and I just walked away. I’m so sorry.”

He lifted his hand and laid it on her little fist. She took his hand in a firm grip.

“Ju dsperd.” You disappeared.

“Dragan Armansky told you?”

He nodded.

“I was off travelling. I needed to get away. I didn’t say goodbye to anybody, just left. Were you worried?”

He shook his head from side to side, slowly.

“You don’t ever have to worry about me.”

“I nv word bow ju. Ju alws get ba. Bt Armshy’s word.” I never worried about you. You always get by. But Armansky was worried.

She smiled her usual crooked smile at him and Palmgren relaxed. He studied her, comparing his memory of her with the woman he saw before him. She had changed. She was whole and clean and rather well dressed. She had taken out the ring that was in her lip and… hmm… the wasp tattoo on her neck was gone too. She looked grown up. He laughed for the first time in many weeks. It sounded like a coughing fit.

Salander’s smile grew bigger and she suddenly felt a warmth that she had not felt in a long time filling her heart.

“Ju dd gd.” You did good. He aimed a hand at her clothes. She nodded.

“I’m doing fine.”

“Howz z noo gardn?” How is the new guardian?

Palmgren noticed Salander’s face darken. Her mouth tightened. She looked at him frankly.

“He’s OK… I can handle him.”

Palmgren’s eyebrows questioned her. Salander looked around the dining room and changed the subject.

“How long have you been here?”

Palmgren may have had a stroke and he still had difficulty speaking and coordinating his movements, but his mind was intact and his radar instantly picked up a false tone in Salander’s voice. In all the years he had known her, he had come to realize that she never lied to him directly, but neither was she totally candid. Her way of not telling him the truth was to distract his attention. There was obviously some problem with her new guardian. Which did not surprise Palmgren.

He felt a deep sense of remorse. How many times had he thought about calling his colleague Nils Bjurman – a fellow lawyer after all, if not a friend – to ask how Salander was doing, but then neglected to do so? And why had he not contested her declaration of incompetence while he still had the power? He knew why – he had wanted, selfishly, to keep his contact with her alive. He loved this damned difficult child like the daughter he never had, and he wanted to have an excuse to maintain the relationship. Besides, it was physically too difficult. He had enough trouble just opening his fly when he tottered to the toilet. He felt as if he were the one who had let Lisbeth Salander down. But she’ll always survive… She’s the most competent person I’ve ever met.

“Dscrt.”

“I didn’t understand.”

“Dstrc crt.”

“The district court? What do you mean?”

“Gtta cancl yr d… dc… dclrash incmp…”

Palmgren’s face turned red and he grimaced when he could not pronounce the words. Salander put a hand on his arm and pressed gently.

“Holger… don’t worry about me. I have plans to take on my declaration of incompetence soon. It’s not your worry any longer, but I may need your help eventually. Is that OK? Will you be my lawyer if I need you?”

He shook his head.

“Tu old.” He rapped his knuckle on the arm of his wheelchair. “Dum ld man.”

“Yeah, you’re a dumb old man if you have that attitude. I need a legal advisor and I want you. You may not be able to give a statement in court, but you can give me advice when the time comes. Would you?”

He shook his head again, and then he nodded.

“Wrk?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Wut ju work on? Not Armshi.” What are you working on? Not Armansky

Salander hesitated while she debated how to explain her situation. It was complicated.

“I’m not working for Armansky anymore. I don’t need to work for him to make a living. I have my own money and I’m doing fine.”

Palmgren’s eyebrows knitted together again.

“I’ll come and visit you a lot, starting today. I’ll tell you all about… but let’s not get stressed about things. Right now there’s something else I want to do.”

She bent down and lifted a bag to the table and took out a chessboard.

“I haven’t had the chance to sweep the floor with you for two whole years.”

He gave up. She was up to some mischief that she did not want to talk about. He was quite sure he would have severe reservations, but he trusted her enough still to know that whatever she was up to might be dubious in the eyes of the law but not a crime against God’s laws. Unlike most other people who knew her, Palmgren was sure that Salander was a genuinely moral person. The problem was that her notion of morality did not always coincide with that of the justice system.

She set out the chessmen in front of him and he recognized with shock that it was his own board. She must have pinched it from the apartment after he fell ill. As a keepsake? She gave him white. All of a sudden he was as happy as a child.

Salander stayed with Palmgren for two hours. She had crushed him three times before a nurse interrupted their bickering over the board, announcing that it was time for his afternoon physical therapy. Salander collected the chessmen and folded up the board.

“Can you tell me what kind of physical therapy he’s getting?” she said.

“It’s strength and coordination training. And we’re making progress, aren’t we?”

Palmgren nodded grimly.

“You can already walk several steps. By summer you’ll be able to walk by yourself in the park. Is this your daughter?”

Salander’s and Palmgren’s eyes met.

“Ster dotr.” Foster daughter.

“How nice that you came to visit.” Where the hell have you been all this time? Salander ignored the unmistakable meaning. She leaned forward and kissed Palmgren on the cheek.

“I’ll come again on Friday.”

Palmgren stood up laboriously from his wheelchair. She walked with him to an elevator. As soon as the elevator doors had closed she went to the front desk and asked to speak to whoever was responsible for the patients. She was referred to a Dr. A. Sivarnandan, whom she found in an office further down a corridor. She introduced herself, explaining that she was Palmgren’s foster daughter.

“I’d like to know how he’s doing and what’s going to happen with him.”

Dr. Sivarnandan looked up Palmgren’s casebook and read the introductory pages. His skin was pitted by smallpox and he had a thin moustache which Salander found absurd. Finally he sat back. To her surprise he spoke with a Finnish accent.

“I have no record of Herr Palmgren having a daughter or foster daughter. In fact, his nearest relative would seem to be an eighty-six-year-old cousin in Jämtland.”

“He took care of me from when I was thirteen until he had his stroke. I was twenty-four at the time.”

She dug into the inside pocket of her jacket and threw a pen on to the desk in front of the doctor.

“My name is Lisbeth Salander. Write my name in his casebook. I’m the closest relation he has in the world.”

“That may be,” replied Dr. Sivarnandan firmly. “But if you are his closest relation you certainly took a long time letting us know. As far as I know, he has only had a few visits from a person who, while not related to him, is to be notified in case the state of his health worsens or if he should pass away.”

“That would be Dragan Armansky.”

Dr. Sivarnandan raised his eyebrows.

“That’s correct. You know him?”

“You can call him and verify that I am who I say I am.”

“That won’t be necessary. I believe you. I was told that you sat and played chess with Herr Palmgren for two hours. But I cannot discuss the state of his health with you without his permission.”

“And you’ll never get it from that stubborn devil. You see, he suffers from the delusion that he shouldn’t burden me with his troubles and that he is still responsible for me, and not the other way around. This is how it is: for two years I thought he was dead. Yesterday I discovered that he was alive. If I’d known that he… it’s complicated to explain, but I’d like to know what sort of prognosis he has and whether he will recover.”

Dr. Sivarnandan picked up the pen and wrote Salander’s name neatly into Palmgren’s casebook. He asked for her social security number and telephone number.

“OK, now you’re formally his foster daughter. This may not be completely by the book, but considering that you’re the first person to visit him since last Christmas when Herr Armansky stopped by… You saw him today – you can see for yourself that he has problems with coordination and speech. He had a stroke.”

“I know. I was the one who found him and called the ambulance.”

“Aha. Then you should know that he was in intensive care for three months. He was in a coma for a long time. Most patients never wake up from a coma like that, but it does happen. Obviously he wasn’t ready to die. First he was put in the dementia ward for chronic long-term patients who are completely unable to take care of themselves. Against all the odds he showed signs of improvement and was moved here for rehabilitation nine months ago.”

“Tell me what chances he has of getting his mobility and speech back.”

Dr. Sivarnandan threw out his hands. “Have you got a crystal ball that’s better than mine? The truthful answer is that I have no idea. He could die from a cerebral haemorrhage tonight. Or he could live a relatively normal life for another twenty years. I have no way of knowing. You might say it’s God who decides.”

“And if he lives another twenty years?”

“It’s been a laborious rehabilitation for him, and it’s only in the past few months that we have been able to see improvements. Six months ago he couldn’t eat without assistance. One month ago he could hardly get out of his chair, which is partly due to muscle atrophy from being in bed for so long. Now at least he can walk by himself for short distances.”

“Can he get better?”

“Yes. Even a lot better. The first threshold was hard, but now we’re seeing progress every day. He has lost almost two years of his life. In a few months, by the summer, I hope he’ll be able to walk in the park.”

“And his speech?”

“His problem is that both his speech centre and his ability to move were knocked out. He was helpless for a long time. Since then he has been forced to learn how to control his body and talk again. He doesn’t always remember which words to use, and he has to learn some words again. But it’s not like teaching a child to talk – he knows the meaning of the word, he just can’t articulate it. Give him a couple of months and you’ll see how his speech has improved compared with today. The same is true of his ability to get around. Nine months ago he couldn’t tell left from right, or up from down in the elevator.”

Salander thought about this for a minute. She discovered that she liked this Dr. A. Sivarnandan with the Indian looks and the Finnish accent.

“What does the A stand for?” she asked.

He gave her an amused look. “Anders.”

“Anders?”

“I was born in Sri Lanka but then adopted by a couple in Åbo when I was three months old.”

“OK, Anders, how can I help?”

“Visit him. Give him intellectual stimulation.”

“I can come every day.”

“I don’t want you to be here every day. If he likes you, I want him to look forward to your visits, not get bored with them.”

“Could any type of special care improve his odds? I can pay whatever it costs.”

He smiled at Salander. “I’m afraid that we’re all the special care there is. Of course I wish we had more resources and that the cutbacks didn’t affect us, but I assure you that he’s getting very competent care.”

“And if you didn’t have to worry about the cutbacks, what else could you offer him?”

“The ideal for patients like Holger Palmgren, of course, would be if I could offer him a full-time personal trainer. But it’s been quite a while since we had resources like that in Sweden.”

“Hire one.”

“Excuse me?”

“Hire him a personal trainer. Find the best you can. Please do it first thing tomorrow. And make sure he has everything he needs in the way of technical equipment. I’ll see to it that the funds are available by the end of the week to pay for it.”

“Are you pulling my leg, young lady?”

Salander gave Dr. Anders Sivarnandan her hard, steady look.

Johansson braked and pulled her Fiat over to the curb outside Gamla Stan tunnelbana station. Svensson opened the door and slipped into the passenger seat. He leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek as she drew away behind a bus.

“Hello, you,” she said without taking her eyes off the traffic. “You look so serious. Has something happened?”

Svensson sighed as he fastened his seat belt.

“No, nothing major. A little problem with the manuscript is all.”

“What problem?”

“Two months till the deadline. I’ve done only nine of the twenty-two confrontations we planned. I’m having trouble with Björck at the Security Police. The bastard is on long-term sick leave and he’s not answering his home telephone.”

“Is he in hospital?”

“Don’t know. Have you ever tried getting information out of Säpo? They won’t even admit that he works there.”

“Did you try his parents?”

“Both dead. He’s not married. He has a brother who lives in Spain. I just have no idea how to get hold of him.”

Johansson glanced at her partner as she navigated across Slussen to the tunnel leading to Nynäsvägen.

“Worst-case scenario, we jettison the section on Björck. Blomkvist insists that everyone we’re planning to expose must have a chance to comment before being hung out to dry.”

“But it would be a shame to miss out on a representative of the Security Police who runs around with prostitutes. What are you going to do?”

“Find him, of course. How are you doing? Nervous?”

He poked her carefully in the side.

“Actually, no. In two months I have to defend my dissertation and become a full-fledged doctor, and I feel as cool as a cucumber.”

“You know the subject backwards. Why be nervous?”

“Look behind you.”

Svensson turned and saw an open box on the backseat.

“Mia – it’s printed!” he said in delight. He held up a copy of the bound thesis.

From Russia with Love

Trafficking, Organized Crime, and Society’s Response

by Mia Johansson

“It wasn’t going to be ready until next week. Damn… we’re going to have to crack open a bottle when we get home. Congratulations, Doctor!”

He leaned over and kissed her again.

“Calm down. I won’t be a doctor for another two months. And keep your hands under control while I’m driving.”

Svensson laughed. Then he turned serious.

“By the way, fly in the ointment and all that… you interviewed a girl named Irina P. about a year ago.”

“Irina P., twenty-two, from St.Petersburg. She first came here in 1999 and has made some return trips. What about her?”

“I ran into Gulbrandsen today. The policeman involved in the Södertälje brothel investigation. Did you read last week that they’d found a girl floating in the canal there? There were headlines in the evening papers. It was Irina P.”

“Oh no. That’s horrible.”

They drove in silence past Skanstull.

“She’s in my thesis,” Johansson said at last. “I gave her the pseudonym Tamara.”

Svensson turned to the interview section of “From Russia with Love” and leafed through it to find “Tamara.” He read with concentration as Mia passed Gullmarsplan and the Globe Arena.

“She was brought here by somebody you call Anton.”

“I can’t use real names. I might get criticism for it during my oral exams, but I cannot name the girls. It would put them in real, mortal danger. And obviously I can’t identify the johns either, since they could work out which of the girls I had talked to. So in all the case studies I only use pseudonyms.”

“Who’s Anton?”

“His name is probably Zala. I’ve never been able to pin down who he is, but I think he’s a Pole or a Yugoslav and that’s not his real name. I talked with Irina P. four or five times, and it wasn’t until our last meeting that she told me his name. She was trying to straighten out her life and get out of the business, but she was certainly really afraid of him.”

“I’m just wondering… I ran into the name Zala a week or so ago.”

“Where was that?”

“I confronted Sandström – the john who’s a journalist. A complete bastard.”

“In what way?”

“He’s not a real journalist. He does advertising newsletters for various companies. And he has sick fantasies about rape that he’d get off on with that girl…”

“I know. I was the one who interviewed her.”

“But did you know that he did the text for a brochure about sexually transmitted diseases for the Public Health Institute?”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I confronted him last week. He totally lost it when I laid out all the evidence and asked why he uses teenage prostitutes from the East to live out his rape fantasies. Gradually I got some sort of explanation out of him.”

“And what was it?”

“Sandström had gotten into a situation where he wasn’t just another customer. He also ran errands for the sex mafia. He gave me the names he knew, including this Zala. He didn’t say anything specific about him, but it’s not a common name.”

Johansson glanced at him.

“Do you know who he is?” Svensson said.

“No. I’ve never been able to identify him. He’s just a name that crops up now and then. The girls all seem terrified of him, and none of them was willing to tell me anything else.”

CHAPTER 9

Dr. Sivarnandan stopped in his tracks on his way into the dining room when he caught sight of Palmgren and Salander. They were bent over their chessboard. She came once a week now, usually on Sundays. She always arrived at around 3:00 and spent a couple of hours playing chess with Palmgren. She left around 8:00 in the evening, when it was time for him to go to bed. The doctor had observed that she did not treat him as you would an invalid – on the contrary, it looked like they were squabbling all the time, and she did not mind Palmgren waiting on her, fetching her coffee.

Dr. Sivarnandan could not make her out, this peculiar young woman who took herself for Palmgren’s foster daughter. She had a very striking look about her and she seemed to treat everything around her with suspicion. She appeared to have no sense of humour at all. Or the ability to carry on a normal conversation. And when he asked what kind of work she did, she somehow contrived not to give him an answer.

A few days after her first visit she had come back with a bundle of documents which declared that a nonprofit foundation had been established with the sole purpose of assisting the care centre with Palmgren’s rehabilitation. The chair of the trustees of the foundation was a lawyer in Gibraltar. There was another lawyer mentioned, also with an address in Gibraltar, and an accountant by the name of Hugo Svensson with an address in Stockholm. The foundation was to make available funds of up to 2.5 million kronor, which Dr. Sivarnandan could dispose of as he wished, but with the exclusive object of giving the patient Holger Palmgren every possible care and facility towards full recovery. Sivarnandan had only to request the necessary funds from the accountant.

It was an unusual, if not unique, arrangement. Sivarnandan had thought hard for several days about whether there was anything unethical about the situation. He decided that there was not and accordingly hired Johanna Karolina Oskarsson as Holger Palmgren’s personal assistant and trainer. She was thirty-nine, a certified physical therapist with a degree in psychology and with extensive experience in rehabilitation care. To Sivarnandan’s surprise her first month’s salary was paid to the hospital in advance, as soon as her employment contract was signed. Until then he had vaguely worried that this might be some sort of hoax.

Within a month Palmgren’s coordination and overall condition had markedly improved. This could be seen from the tests he underwent every week. How much the improvement was due to the training and how much was thanks to Salander, Sivarnandan could only wonder. There was no doubt that Palmgren was making great efforts and looked forward to her visits with the enthusiasm of a child. It even seemed to amuse him that he was regularly pummelled at the chessboard.

Dr. Sivarnandan had kept them company on one occasion. Palmgren was playing white and had opened the Sicilian quite correctly. He had pondered each move long and hard. Whatever his physical handicap as a result of the stroke, there was nothing wrong now with his intellectual acuity.

Salander sat there reading a book on the frequency calibration of radio telescopes in a weightless state. She was sitting on a cushion, the better to be level with the table. When Palmgren made his move she glanced up and moved her piece, apparently without studying the board, and went back to her book. Palmgren resigned after the twenty-seventh move. Salander looked up and with a frown inspected the board for perhaps fifteen seconds.

“No,” she said. “You have a chance for a stalemate.”

Palmgren sighed and spent five minutes studying the board. At last he narrowed his gaze at Salander.

“Prove it.”

She turned the board around and took over his pieces. She forced a stalemate on the thirty-ninth move.

“Good Lord,” Sivarnandan said.

“That’s the way she is. Don’t ever play with her for money,” Palmgren said.

Sivarnandan had played chess himself since he was a boy, and as a teenager he was in the school tournament in Åbo, and came in second. He regarded himself as a competent amateur. Salander, he could see, was an uncanny chess player. She had obviously never played for a club, and when he mentioned that the game seemed to have been a variant of a classic game by Lasker, she gave him an uncomprehending look. She had never heard of Emanuel Lasker. He could not help wondering whether her talent was innate, and if so, whether she had other talents that might interest a psychologist.

But he did not say a word. He could see that his patient was feeling better than he ever had since coming to Ersta.

Bjurman arrived home late in the evening. He had spent four whole weeks at his summer cabin outside Stallarholmen, but he was dispirited. Nothing had happened to change his situation except that the giant had informed him that his people were interested in the proposal and that it would cost him 100,000 kronor.

Mail was piled up on the doormat. He put it all on the kitchen table. He was less and less interested in everything to do with work and the outside world, and he did not look at the letters until later in the evening. Then he shuffled through them absentmindedly.

One was from Handelsbanken. It was a statement for the withdrawal of 9,312 kronor from Lisbeth Salander’s savings account.

She was back.

He went into his office and put the document on his desk. He looked at it with hate-filled eyes for more than a minute as he collected his thoughts. He was forced to look up the telephone number. Then he lifted the receiver and dialled the number of a mobile with a prepaid calling card.

The blond giant answered with a slight accent: “Yes?”

“It’s Nils Bjurman.”

“What do you want?”

“She’s back in Sweden.”

There was a brief silence at the other end.

“That’s good. Don’t call this number again.”

“But –”

“You will be notified shortly.”

Then, to his considerable irritation, the connection was cut. Bjurman swore to himself. He went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a triple measure of Kentucky bourbon. He swallowed the drink in two gulps. I’ve got to go easy on the booze, he thought. Then he poured one more measure and took the glass back to his desk, where he looked at the statement from Handelsbanken again.

Mimmi was massaging Salander’s back and neck. She had been kneading intently for twenty minutes while Salander mainly enjoyed herself and uttered an occasional groan of pleasure. A massage from Mimmi was a fantastic experience, and she felt like a kitten who just wanted to purr and wave its paws around.

She stifled a sigh of disappointment when Mimmi slapped her on the backside and said that should do it. For a while she lay still in the vain hope that Mimmi would go on, but when she heard her pick up her wineglass, Salander rolled onto her back.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re sitting in front of your computer all day. That’s why your back hurts.”

“I just pulled a muscle.”

They were lying naked in Mimmi’s bed on Lundagatan, drinking red wine and feeling silly. Since Salander had resumed her friendship with Mimmi, it was as if she couldn’t get enough of her. It had become a bad habit to call her every day – much too often. She looked at Mimmi and reminded herself not to get too close to anyone again. It might end with someone getting hurt.

Mimmi leaned over the edge of the bed and opened the drawer of her bedside table. She took out a small flat package wrapped in flowered paper with a gold bow and tossed it into Lisbeth’s lap.

“What’s this?”

“Your birthday present.”

“My birthday’s more than a month away.”

“It’s your present from last year, but I couldn’t find you.”

“Should I open it?”

“If you feel like it.”

She put down her wineglass, shook the package, and opened it carefully. She drew out a beautiful cigarette case with a lid of blue and black enamel and some tiny Chinese characters as decoration.

“You really should stop smoking,” Mimmi said. “But if you won’t, at least you can keep your cigarettes in a pretty box.”

“Thank you,” Salander said. “You’re the only person who ever gives me birthday presents. What do the characters mean?”

“How on earth would I know that? I don’t understand Chinese. I just found it at the flea market.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“It’s just some cheap nothing, but it looked as if it was made for you. We’ve run out of wine. You want to go out and get a beer?”

“Does that mean we have to leave the bed and get dressed?”

“I’m afraid so. But what’s the point of living in Söder if you can’t go to a bar now and then?”

Salander sighed.

“Come on,” Mimmi said, pointing at the jewel in Salander’s navel. “We can come back here afterwards.”

Salander sighed again, but she put one foot on the floor and reached for her underwear.

Svensson was working late at the desk he had been assigned in a corner of the Millennium offices when he heard the rattle of a key in the door. He looked at the clock and saw that it was past 9:00 p.m. Blomkvist seemed surprised to find someone still working there.

“The lamp of diligence and all that, Mikael. I’m fine – tuning the book and I lost track of time. What are you doing here?”

“Just stopped by to pick up a file I forgot. Is everything going well?”

“Sure… Well, actually no… I’ve spent three weeks trying to track down Björck from Säpo. He seems to have vanished without a trace. Perhaps he’s been kidnapped by some enemy secret service.”

Blomkvist pulled up a chair and sat thinking for a moment.

“Have you tried the old lottery trick?”

“What’s that?”

“Think of a name, write a letter saying that he’s won a mobile telephone with a GPS navigator, or whatever. Print it out so it looks official and post it to his address – in this case that P.O. box he has. He’s already won the mobile, a brand-new Nokia. But more than that, he’s one of twenty people who can go on to win 100,000 kronor. All he has to do is take part in a marketing study for various products. The session will take about an hour and be done by a professional interviewer. And then… well.”

Svensson stared at Blomkvist, openmouthed. “Are you serious?”

“Why not? You’ve tried everything else, and even a spook from Säpo should be able to figure out that the odds of winning a hundred grand are pretty good if he’s one of only twenty people on the list.”

Svensson laughed out loud. “You’re nuts. Is that legal?”

“I can’t imagine it’s illegal to give away a mobile telephone.”

“You really are out of your mind.”

Svensson kept laughing. Blomkvist hesitated a moment. He was actually on his way home and seldom went to bars, but he liked Svensson’s company.

“Do you feel like going out for a beer?” he said.

Svensson looked again at the clock.

“Why not?” he said. “Gladly. A quick one. Let me leave a message for Mia. She’s out with the girls and was going to pick me up on her way home.”

They went to Kvarnen, mostly because it was comfortable and close by. Svensson chuckled as he composed the letter to Björck at Security Police HQ. Blomkvist looked dubiously at his easily amused colleague. They were lucky enough to get a table near the door. Each of them ordered a large glass of strong beer, and with their heads together they began to drink and discuss Svensson’s book.

Blomkvist did not see Salander standing at the bar with Miriam Wu. Salander took a step back to put Mimmi between her and Blomkvist. She looked at him from behind Mimmi’s shoulder.

She had not been in a bar since she came back and – just her luck – she had to run into him. Kalle Fucking Blomkvist. It was the first time she had seen him in more than a year.

“What’s wrong?” Mimmi said.

“Nothing.”

They kept talking. Or rather, Mimmi went on with her story about a dyke she had met on a trip to London a few years back. She had been visiting an art gallery and the situation had gotten funnier and funnier as Mimmi tried to pick her up. Salander nodded now and then, but as usual missed the point of the story.

Blomkvist had not changed much, she decided. He looked absurdly well-approachable and relaxed, but with a grave expression. He was listening to what his companion was saying, nodding now and then. It seemed to be a serious discussion.

Salander looked at Blomkvist’s friend. A man with a blond crew cut several years younger than Blomkvist, who was talking intently. She had no idea who he was.

All of a sudden a whole group came up to Blomkvist’s table and shook hands with him. Blomkvist got a pat on the cheek from a woman who said something everyone else laughed at. Blomkvist looked self-conscious, but he laughed too.

Salander scowled.

“You’re not listening to what I’m saying,” Mimmi said.

“Of course I am.”

“You’re terrible company in a bar. I give up. Should we go home and fuck instead?”

“In a bit,” Salander said.

She moved a little closer to Mimmi and put a hand on her hip.

Mimmi looked down at her partner and said, “I feel like kissing you on the mouth.”

“Don’t do it.”

“Are you afraid people will think you’re a dyke?”

“I don’t want to attract attention right now.”

“Let’s go home then.”

“Not yet. Wait a while.”

They did not have long to wait. Twenty minutes after they arrived, the man Blomkvist was with got a call on his mobile. They drained their glasses and stood up simultaneously.

“Check it out,” Mimmi said. “That guy over there is Mikael Blomkvist. He was more famous than a rock star after the Wennerström affair.”

“You don’t say.”

“Did you miss all that? It was about the time when you left the country.”

“I’ve heard it mentioned.”

Salander waited for another five minutes before she looked at Mimmi.

“You wanted to kiss me on the mouth.”

Mimmi looked at her in surprise. “I was just teasing.”

Salander stood on tiptoe and pulled Mimmi’s face down to her level and gave her a long, deep kiss. When they separated there was applause.

“You’re nuts, you know that?” Mimmi said.

Salander did not get home until 7:00 in the morning. She pulled out the neck of her T-shirt and sniffed. She thought about taking a shower but decided the hell with it, and instead left her clothes on the floor and went to bed. She slept till 4:00 in the afternoon, then got up and went down to Söderhallarna market and had breakfast.

She thought about Blomkvist, and about her reaction to suddenly finding herself in the same room as him. She had been annoyed at his presence, but she also discovered that it no longer hurt to see him. He had been transformed to a little blip on the horizon, a minor perturbation factor in her existence. There were worse disturbances in life.

But she wished she had had the guts to go up to him and say hello. Or possibly break his legs. She wasn’t sure which.

Anyway, she was curious about what he was up to. She ran a few errands in the afternoon and came home around 7:00 p.m. She booted up her PowerBook and started Asphyxia 1.3. The icon MikBlom/laptop was still on the server in Holland. She double-clicked and opened a copy of Blomkvist’s hard drive. It was her first visit to his computer since she had left Sweden more than a year before. She noticed with satisfaction that he still had not upgraded to the latest MacOS, which would have meant that Asphyxia would have crashed and the hacking would have been terminated. She realized that she would have to rewrite the programme so that an upgrade would not interfere with it.

The volume on the hard drive had increased by almost 6.9 gigabytes since her previous visit. A large part of the increase was due to PDF files and Quark documents. The documents did not take up much room but the bitmaps did, despite the fact that the images were compressed. Since he had returned as publisher he had apparently archived every issue of Millennium.

She sorted the files on the hard disk by date with the oldest at the top and noticed that Blomkvist had spent a great deal of time over the past few months on a folder named, apparently a book project. Then she opened Blomkvist’s email and read carefully through the address list in his correspondence.

One address made Salander jump. On January 26 Blomkvist had got an email from Harriet Fucking Vanger. She opened the message and read a few concise lines about a board meeting to take place at the Millennium offices. The message ended with the information that Vanger had booked the same hotel room as last time.

Salander digested the information. Then she shrugged and downloaded Blomkvist’s mail, Svensson’s book manuscript with the working title The Leeches and the subtitle Society’s Support for the Prostitution Industry. She also found a copy of a thesis entitled “From Russia with Love” written by a woman named Mia Johansson.

She disconnected and went into the kitchen to put on some coffee. Then she sat on her new sofa in the living room with her PowerBook. She opened Mimmi’s cigarette case and lit a Marlboro Light. The rest of the evening she spent reading.

By 9:00 she had finished Johansson’s thesis. She bit her lower lip.

By 10:30 she had finished Svensson’s book. Millennium would soon be making headlines again.

At 11:30 she was reading the last of Blomkvist’s emails when she suddenly sat up and opened her eyes wide.

She felt a cold shiver go down her spine.

It was a message from Svensson to Blomkvist.

In an aside Svensson mentioned that he had some tentative ideas about an Eastern European gangster named Zala who might get a chapter all to himself – but acknowledged that there was not much time till the deadline. Blomkvist hadn’t answered the email.

Zala.

Salander sat motionless until the screen saver went on.

Svensson put aside his notebook and scratched his head. He gazed at the single word at the top of the page in his notebook. Four letters.

Zala.

He spent three minutes deep in thought, drawing labyrinthine rings around the name. Then he went and got a cup of coffee from the kitchenette. It was time to go home to bed, but he had discovered that he enjoyed working late at the Millennium offices when it was quiet in the building.

He had all the material under control, but for the first time since he started the project he felt uneasy that he might have missed an important detail.

Zala.

Until that point he had been impatient to finish the writing and get the book published, but now he wished he had more time.

He thought about the autopsy report that Inspector Gulbrandsen had let him read. Irina P.’s body had been found in Södertälje canal. She had devastating injuries to her face and chest. The cause of death was a broken neck, but two of her other injuries had been judged fatal. Six ribs had been broken and her left lung punctured. She had a ruptured spleen. The injuries were hard to interpret. The pathologist had offered the suggestion that a wooden club wrapped in cloth had been the weapon used. Why a killer would wrap a murder weapon in cloth could not be explained, but the scale of the injuries was not characteristic of an ordinary assault.

The murder remained unsolved, and Gulbrandsen had said that the prospect of their solving the case was slender.

The name Zala had come up on four occasions in the material that Mia had gathered over the last two years, but always on the periphery, always eerily elusive. Nobody knew who he was and nobody could provide proof that he even existed. Some of the girls had referred to his name being used as a threat, a terrifying warning to those who did not toe the line. He had spent a whole week hunting for more concrete information about Zala, asking questions of police, journalists, and several recently developed sources with contacts in the sex trade.

He had been in touch with the journalist Sandström, whom he had every intention of exposing in the book. Sandström had begged and pleaded for Svensson to have mercy. He had offered a bribe. Svensson was not going to change his mind, but he did use his advantage to pressure Sandström for information about Zala.

Sandström claimed he had never met Zala, but he had talked to him on the telephone. No, he did not have the number. No, he could not say who had set up the contact.

Svensson had been struck by the realization that Sandström was terrified. It was a terror beyond the threat of exposure. He was afraid for his life. Why?

CHAPTER 10

The journeys to and from Ersta were time-consuming and a hassle. In the middle of March Salander decided to buy a car. She started by acquiring a parking place, a much greater problem than buying the car itself.

She had a space in the garage beneath the building in Mosebacke, but she did not want anyone to be able to connect the car to where she lived on Fiskargatan. On the other hand, several years before she had put herself on a waiting list for a space in the garage of her old housing association apartment on Lundagatan. She called to find out where on the list she was now and was told that she was at the top. And not only that – at the end of the month there would be a spot free. Sweet. She called Mimmi and asked her to make a contract with the association right away. The next day she started hunting for a car.

She had the money to buy whatever Rolls-Royce or Ferrari she wanted, but she was not remotely interested in anything ostentatious. Instead she went to two dealers in Nacka and came away with a four-year-old burgundy Honda automatic. She spent an hour going over every detail, including the engine, to the salesman’s exasperation. On principle she talked the price down a couple of thousand and paid in cash.

Then she drove to Lundagatan, where she knocked on Mimmi’s door and gave her a set of keys. Sure, Mimmi could use the car if she asked in advance. Since the garage space would not be free until the end of the month, they parked on the street.

Mimmi was on her way to a date and a movie with a girlfriend Salander had never heard of. Since she was made up outrageously and dressed in something awful with what looked like a dog’s collar round her neck, Salander assumed it was one of Mimmi’s flames, and when Mimmi asked if she wanted to come along she said no thanks. She had no desire to end up in a threesome with one of Mimmi’s long-legged girlfriends who was no doubt unfathomably sexy but would make her feel like an idiot. Anyway, Salander had something to do in town, so they took the tunnelbana together to Hötorget, and there they parted.

Salander walked to OnOff on Sveavägen and made it with two minutes to spare before closing time. She bought a toner cartridge for her laser printer and asked them to take it out of the box so that it would fit in her backpack.

When she came out of the shop, she was thirsty and hungry. She walked to Stureplan, where she decided on Café Hedon, a place she had never been to before or even heard about. She instantly recognized Nils Bjurman from behind and turned right around in the doorway. She stood by the picture window facing the pavement and craned her neck so that she could observe her guardian from behind a serving counter.

The sight of Bjurman aroused no dramatic feelings in Salander, not anger, nor hatred, nor fear. As far as she was concerned, the world would assuredly be a better place without him, but he was alive only because she had decided that he would be more useful to her that way. She looked across at the man opposite Bjurman, and her eyes widened when he stood up. Click.

He was an exceptionally big man, at least six foot six and well built. Exceptionally well built, as a matter of fact. He had a weak face and short blond hair, but overall he made a very powerful impression.

Salander saw the man lean forward and say something quietly to Bjurman, who nodded. They shook hands and Salander noticed that Bjurman quickly drew his hand back.

What sort of guy are you and what business do you have with Bjurman?

Salander walked briskly down the street and stood under the awning of a tobacconist shop. She was looking at a newspaper headline when the blond man came out of Café Hedon and without looking around turned left. He passed less than a foot behind Salander. She gave him a good head start before she followed him.

It was not a long walk. The man went straight down into the tunnelbana station at Birger Jarlsgatan and bought a ticket at the gate. He waited on the southbound platform – the direction Salander was going anyway – and got on the Norsborg train. He got off at Slussen, changed to the green line towards Farsta, and got off again at Skanstull. From there he walked to Blomberg’s Café on Götgatan.

Salander stopped outside. She studied the man the blond hulk had come to meet. Click. Salander saw immediately that something sinister was going on. The man was overweight and had a narrow, untrustworthy face. His hair was pulled back into a ponytail and he had a mousy moustache. He wore a denim jacket, black jeans, and high-heeled boots. On the back of his right hand he had a tattoo, but Salander could not make out the design. He wore a gold chain around his wrist and was smoking Lucky Strikes. His gaze was glassy-eyed, like someone who got high too often. Salander also noticed that he had a leather vest on under his jacket. She could tell he was a biker.

The giant did not order anything. He seemed to be giving instructions. The man in the denim jacket paid close attention but did not contribute to the conversation. Salander reminded herself that one day soon she should buy herself a shotgun mike.

After only five minutes the giant left Blomberg’s Café. Salander retreated a few paces, but he did not even look in her direction. He walked forty yards to the steps to Allhelgonagatan, where he got into a white Volvo. Salander managed to read his licence plate number before he turned at the next corner.

Salander hurried back to Blomberg’s, but the table was empty. She looked up and down the street but could not see the man with the ponytail. Then she caught a glimpse of him across the street as he pushed open the door to McDonald’s.

She had to go inside to find him again. He was sitting with another man who was wearing his vest outside his denim jacket. Salander read the words SVAVELSJö MC. The logo was a stylized motorcycle wheel that looked like a Celtic cross with an axe.

She stood on Götgatan for a minute before heading north. Her internal warning system had suddenly gone on high alert.

Salander stopped at the 7-Eleven and bought a week’s worth of food: a jumbo pack of Billy’s Pan Pizza, three frozen fish casseroles, three bacon pies, two pounds of apples, two loaves of bread, a pound of cheese, milk, coffee, a carton of Marlboro Lights, and the evening papers. She walked up Svartensgatan to Mosebacke and looked all around before she punched in the door code of her building. She put one of the bacon pies in the microwave and drank milk straight from the carton. She switched on the coffee machine and then booted up her computer, clicking on Asphyxia 1.3 and logging in to the mirrored copy of Bjurman’s hard drive. She spent the next half hour going through the contents of his computer.

She found absolutely nothing of interest. He seemed to use his email rarely; she discovered only a dozen brief personal messages to or from acquaintances. None of the emails had any connection to her.

She found a newly created folder with porn photos that made clear that he was still interested in the sadistic humiliation of women. Technically it wasn’t a violation of her rule that he couldn’t have anything to do with women.

She opened the folder of documents dealing with Bjurman’s role as Salander’s guardian and read through each of his monthly reports. They corresponded precisely to the copies he had sent to one of her hotmail addresses.

Everything normal.

Maybe a small discrepancy… When she opened the file properties in Word for the various monthly reports, she could see that he usually wrote them in the first few days of each month, that he spent about four hours editing each report, and sent them punctually to the Guardianship Agency on the twentieth of every month. It was now the middle of March and he had not yet begun work on the current month’s report. Lazy? Out too late? Busy with something else? Up to some tricks? Salander frowned.

She shut down the computer and sat on her window seat and opened her cigarette case. She lit a cigarette and looked out at the darkness. She had been sloppy about keeping track of him. He’s as slippery as an eel.

She was genuinely worried. First Kalle Fucking Blomkvist, then the name Zala, and now Nils Fucking Slimebag Bjurman together with an alpha male on steroids with contacts in some gang of ex-con bikers. Within a few days, several ripples of disquiet had materialized in the orderly life Salander was trying to create for herself.

At 2:30 the following morning Salander put a key in the front door of the building on Upplandsgatan near Odenplan, where Bjurman lived. She stopped outside his door, carefully lifted up the mail slot cover, and shoved in an extremely sensitive microphone she had bought at Counterspy in Mayfair in London. She had never heard of Ebbe Carlsson, but that was the shop where he had bought the famous eavesdropping equipment that caused Sweden’s minister of justice to resign suddenly in the late 1980s. Salander inserted her earpiece and adjusted the volume.

She could hear the dull humming of the refrigerator and the sharp ticking of at least two clocks, one of which was the wall clock in the living room to the left of the front door. She turned up the volume and listened, holding her breath. She heard all sorts of creaks and rumbles from the apartment, but no evidence of human activity. It took her a minute to notice and decipher the faint sounds of heavy, regular breathing.

Bjurman was asleep.

She withdrew the microphone and stuffed it in the pocket of her leather jacket. She was wearing dark jeans and sneakers with crepe soles. She inserted the key in the lock without a sound and pushed the door open a crack. Before she opened it all the way she took the Taser out of her pocket. She had brought no other weapon. She did not think she would need anything more powerful for dealing with Bjurman.

She closed the door behind her and padded on soundless feet towards the corridor outside his bedroom. She stopped when she saw the light from a lamp, but from where she stood she could already hear his snoring. She slipped into his bedroom. The lamp stood in the window. What’s wrong, Bjurman? A little scared of the dark?

She stood next to his bed and watched him for several minutes. He had aged and seemed unkempt. The room smelled of a man who was not taking good care of his hygiene.

She did not feel a grain of sympathy. For a second a hint of merciless hatred flashed in her eyes. She noticed a glass on the nightstand and leaned over to sniff it. Whiskey.

After a while she left the bedroom. She took a short tour through the kitchen, found nothing unusual, continued through the living room, and stopped at the door of Bjurman’s office. From her jacket pocket she took a handful of small bits of crispbread, which she placed carefully on the parquet floor in the dark. If anyone tried to follow her through the living room, the crunching noise would alert her.

She sat down at Bjurman’s desk and placed the Taser in front of her. Methodically she searched the drawers and went through correspondence dealing with Bjurman’s private accounts. She noticed that he had become sloppier and more sporadic with balancing his accounts.

The bottom drawer of the desk was locked. Salander frowned. When she had visited a year before, all the drawers had been unlocked. Her eyes remained unfocused as she visualized the drawer’s contents. It had contained a camera, a telephoto lens, a small Olympus pocket tape recorder, a leather-bound photograph album, and a little box with a necklace and a gold ring inscribed TILDA AND JACOB BJURMAN APRIL 23, 1951. Salander knew that these were the names of his parents and that both of them were dead. Presumably it was a wedding ring, now a keepsake.

So, he locks up stuff he thinks is valuable.

She inspected the rolltop cabinet behind the desk and took out the two binders containing his reports of her guardianship. For fifteen minutes she read each one. Salander was a pleasant and conscientious young woman. Four months earlier he had written that she seemed so rational and competent that there was good reason to discuss at the next annual review whether or not she required further guardianship. It was elegantly phrased and amounted to the first building block in the revocation of her declaration of incompetence.

The binder also contained handwritten notes that showed Bjurman had been contacted by one Ulrika von Liebenstaahl at the Guardianship Agency for a general discussion of Salander’s condition. The words necessity for psychiatric assessment had been underlined.

Salander pouted, replaced the binders, and looked around.

She could not find anything of note. Bjurman seemed to be behaving in accordance with her instructions. She bit her lower lip. She still had a feeling that something was not right.

She got up from the chair and was about to turn off the desk lamp when she stopped. She took out the binders and looked through them again. She was perplexed. The binders should have contained more. A year ago there had been a summary of her development since childhood from the Guardianship Agency. That was missing. Why would Bjurman remove papers from an active case? She frowned. She could not think of any good reason. Unless he was filing additional documentation somewhere else. Her eyes swept across the shelves of the rolltop cabinet and the bottom desk drawer.

She did not have a picklock with her, so she padded back to Bjurman’s bedroom and fished his key ring out of his suit jacket, which was hanging over a wooden valet stand. The same objects were in the drawer as a year ago. But the collection had been supplemented with a flat box whose printed illustration showed a Colt.45 Magnum.

She thought through the research that she had done about Bjurman two years ago. He liked to shoot and was a member of a shooting club. According to the public weapons registry he had a licence for a Colt.45 Magnum.

Reluctantly she came to the conclusion that it was no surprise he kept the drawer locked.

She did not like the situation, but she could not think of any immediate pretext for waking him and scaring the shit out of him.

Johansson woke at 6:30 a.m. She heard the morning TV on low volume from the living room and smelled freshly brewed coffee. She also heard the clacking of keys from Svensson’s iBook. She smiled.

She had never seen him work so hard on a story before. Millennium had been a good move. He was often afflicted with writer’s block, and it seemed as though hanging out with Blomkvist and Berger and the others was having a beneficial effect on him. He would come home gloomy after Blomkvist had pointed out shortcomings or shot down some of his reasoning, but then he’d work twice as hard.

She wondered whether it was the right moment to interrupt his concentration. Her period was three weeks late. She had not yet taken a pregnancy test. Perhaps it was time.

She would soon turn thirty. In less than a month she had to defend her dissertation. Dr. Johansson. She smiled again and decided not to say anything to Svensson before she was sure. Maybe she would wait until he was finished with his book and she was giving a party after she got her doctorate.

She dozed for ten more minutes before she got up and went into the living room with a sheet wrapped around her. He looked up.

“It’s not 7:00 yet,” she said.

“Blomkvist is acting superior again.”

“Has he been mean to you? Serves you right. You like him, don’t you?”

Svensson leaned back in the living-room sofa and met her eyes. After a moment he nodded.

“Millennium is a great place to work. I talked to Mikael at Kvarnen before you picked me up last night. He was wondering what I was going to be doing after this project was finished.”

“Aha. And what did you say?”

“That I didn’t know. I’ve hung around as a freelancer for so many years now. I’d be glad of something more steady.”

“Millennium.”

He nodded.

“Mikael has tested the waters, and wanted to know if I’d be interested in a part-time job. Same contract as Henry Cortez and Lotta Karim are on. I’d get a desk and a retainer from Millennium and could take in the rest on the side.”

“Do you want to do that?”

“If they come up with a concrete offer, I’ll say yes.”

“OK, but it’s not 7:00 yet and it’s Saturday.”

“I know. I just thought I’d polish it up a bit here and there.”

“I think you should come back to bed and polish something else.”

She smiled at him and turned up a corner of the sheet. He put the computer on standby.

Salander spent a good deal of time over the next few days doing research on her PowerBook. Her search extended in many different directions, and she was not always sure what she was looking for.

Some of the fact collecting was simple. From the Media Archive she put together a history of Svavelsjö MC. The club appeared in newspaper stories going by the name Tälje Hog Riders. Police had raided the clubhouse, at that time located in an abandoned schoolhouse outside Södertälje, when neighbours reported shots fired. The police turned up in astonishing force and broke up a beer-drenched party that had degenerated into a shooting contest with an AK-4, which later turned out to have been stolen from the disbanded I20 regiment in Västerbotten in the early 1980s.

According to one evening paper, Svavelsjö MC had six or seven members and a dozen hangers-on. All the full members had been in jail. Two stood out. The club leader was Carl-Magnus “Magge” Lundin, who was pictured in Aftonbladet when the police raided the premises in 2001. He had been convicted on five charges of theft, receiving stolen goods, and for drug offences in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the sentences – for a crime which involved grievous bodily harm – put him away for eighteen months. He was released in 1995 and soon afterwards became president of Tälje Hog Riders, now Svavelsjö MC.

According to the police gang unit, the club’s number two was Sonny Nieminen, now thirty-seven years old, who had run up no fewer than twenty-three convictions. He had started his career at the age of sixteen when he was put on probation and in institutional care for assault and battery and theft. Over the next ten years he was convicted on five counts of theft, one of aggravated theft, two of unlawful intimidation, two narcotics offences, extortion, assault on a civil servant, two counts of possessing an illegal weapon, one criminal weapons charge, driving under the influence, and six counts of assault. He had been sentenced according to a scale that was incomprehensible to Salander: probation, fines, and repeated stints of thirty to sixty days in jail, until 1989 when he was put away for ten months for aggravated assault and robbery. He was out a few months later and kept his nose clean until October 1990. Then he got into a fight in a bar in Södertälje and ended up with a conviction for manslaughter and a six-year prison sentence. He was out by 1995.

In 1996 he was arrested as an accessory to an armed robbery. He had provided three of the robbers with weapons. He was sentenced to four years and released in 1999. According to a newspaper article from 2001 in which Nieminen was not named – but where the details of the suspect were such that he was effectively identified – he looked more than likely to have played his part in the murder of a member of a rival gang.

Salander downloaded the mug shots of Nieminen and Lundin. Nieminen had a photogenic face with dark curly hair and dangerous eyes. Lundin just looked like a complete idiot, and was without doubt the man who had met the giant at Blomberg’s Café. Nieminen was the man waiting in McDonald’s.

Via the national vehicle register she traced the white Volvo to the car rental firm Auto-Expert in Eskilstuna. She dialled their number and spoke to a Refik Alba:

“My name is Gunilla Hansson. My dog was run over yesterday by someone who just drove off. The bastard was driving a car from your firm – I could tell from the licence plate. A white Volvo.” She gave the number.

“I’m so sorry.”

“That’s not enough, I’m afraid. I want the name of the driver so that I can sue him.”

“Have you reported the matter to the police?”

“No, I’d like to settle it directly.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give out the names of our clients unless a police report has been filed.”

Salander’s voice darkened. She asked whether it was good practice to oblige her to report the company’s clients to the police force instead of resolving matters with much less trouble. Refik Alba apologized once more and repeated that he was powerless to circumvent company rules.

The name Zala was another dead end. With two breaks for Billy’s Pan Pizza, Salander spent most of the day at her computer with only a big bottle of Coca-Cola for company.

She found hundreds of Zalas – from an Italian athlete to a composer in Argentina. But she did not find the one she was looking for.

She tried Zalachenko, but that was a dead end too.

Frustrated, she stumbled into bed and slept for twelve hours straight. When she woke it was 11:00 a.m. She put on some coffee and ran a bath in the Jacuzzi. She poured in bubble bath and brought coffee and sandwiches for breakfast. She wished that she had Mimmi to keep her company, but she still had not even told her where she lived.

At noon she got out of the bath, towelled herself dry, and put on a bathrobe. She turned on the computer again.

The names Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson yielded better results. Via Google’s search engine she was able to quickly put together a brief summary of what they had been up to in recent years. She downloaded copies of some of Svensson’s articles and found a photographic byline of him. No great surprise that he was the man she had seen with Blomkvist at Kvarnen. The name had been given a face, and vice versa.

She found several texts about or by Mia Johansson. She had first come to the media’s attention with a report on the different treatment received by men and women at the hands of the law. There had been a number of editorials and articles in women’s organizations’ newsletters. Johansson herself had written several more articles. Salander read attentively. Some feminists found Johansson’s conclusions significant, others criticized her for “spreading bourgeois illusions.”

At 2:00 in the afternoon she went into Asphyxia 1.3, but instead of MikBlom/laptop she selected MikBlom/office, Blomkvist’s desktop computer at Millennium. She knew from experience that his office computer contained hardly anything of interest. Apart from the fact that he sometimes used it to surf the Net, he worked almost exclusively on his iBook. But he did have administrator rights for the whole Millennium office. She quickly found what she was looking for: the password for Millennium’s internal network.

To get into other computers at Millennium, the mirrored hard drive on the server in Holland was not sufficient. The original of MikBlom/office also had to be on and connected to the internal computer network. She was in luck. Blomkvist was apparently at work and had his desktop on. She waited ten minutes but could not see any sign of activity, which she took to indicate that he had turned on the computer when he came into the office and had possibly used it to surf the Net, then left it on while he did something else or used his laptop.

This had to be done carefully. During the next hour Salander hacked cautiously from one computer to another and downloaded email from Berger, Malm, and an employee whose name she did not recognize, Malin Eriksson. Finally she located Svensson’s desktop. According to the system information it was an older Macintosh PowerPC with a hard disk of only 750 MB, so it must be a leftover that was probably only used for word processing by occasional freelancers. It was linked to the computer network, which meant that Svensson was in Millennium’s editorial offices right now. She downloaded his email and searched his hard drive. She found a folder with the short but sweet name.

The blond giant had just picked up 203,000 kronor in cash, which was an unexpectedly large sum for the three kilos of methamphetamine he had delivered to Lundin in late January. It was a tidy profit for a few hours of practical work – collecting the meth from the courier, storing it for a while, making delivery to Lundin, and then taking 50 percent of the profit. Svavelsjö MC could turn over that amount every month, and Lundin’s gang was only one of three such operations – the other two were around Göteborg and Malmö. Together the gangs brought him roughly half a million kronor in profit every month.

And yet he was in such a bad mood that he pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the engine. He had not slept for thirty hours and was feeling fuzzy. He got out to stretch his legs and take a piss. The night was cool and the stars were bright. He was not far from Järna.

The conflict he was having was almost ideological in nature. The potential supply of methamphetamine was limitless within a radius of 250 miles from Stockholm. The demand was indisputably huge. The rest was logistics – how to transport the product from point A to point B, or to be more precise, from a cellar workshop in Tallinn to the Free Port in Stockholm.

This was a recurring problem – how to guarantee regular transport from Estonia to Sweden? In fact it was the main problem and the weak link, since after several years he was still improvising every time. And fuckups had been all too frequent lately. He was proud of his ability to organize. He had built up a well-oiled network cultivated with equal portions of carrot and stick. He was the one who had done the legwork, cemented partnerships, negotiated deals, and made sure that the deliveries got to the right place.

The carrot was the incentive offered to subcontractors like Lundin – a solid and relatively risk-free profit. The system was a good one. Lundin did not have to lift a finger to get the goods – no stressful buying trips or dealings with people who could be anyone from the drug squad to the Russian mafia. Lundin knew that the giant would deliver and then collect his 50 percent.

The stick was for when complications arose. A gabby street dealer who had found out far too much about the supply chain had almost implicated Svavelsjö MC. He had been forced to get involved and punish the guy.

He was good at dealing out punishment.

But the operation was becoming too burdensome to oversee.

He lit a cigarette and stretched his legs against a gate into a field.

Methamphetamine was a discreet and easy-to-manage source of income – big profits, small risks. Weapons were risky, and considering the risks they were simply not good business.

Occasionally industrial espionage or smuggling electronic components to Eastern Europe – even though the market had dropped off in recent years – was justifiable.

Whores from the Baltics, on the other hand, were an entirely unsatisfactory investment. The business was small change, and liable at any time to set off hypocritical screeds in the media and debates in that strange political entity called the Swedish parliament. The one advantage was that everybody likes a whore – prosecutors, judges, policemen, even an occasional member of parliament. Nobody was going to dig too deep to bring that business down.

Even a dead whore would not necessarily cause a political uproar. If the police could catch a suspect within a few hours who still had bloodstains on his clothes, then a conviction would follow and the murderer would spend several years in prison or some other obscure institution. But if no suspect was found within forty-eight hours, the police would soon enough find more important things to investigate, as he knew from experience.

He did not like the trade in whores, though. He did not like them at all, their makeup-plastered faces and shrill, drunken laughter. They were unclean. And there was always the risk that one of them would get the idea she could seek asylum or start blabbing to the police or to reporters. Then he would have to take matters into his own hands and mete out punishment. And if the revelation was blatant enough, prosecutors and police would be forced to act – otherwise parliament really would wake up and pay attention. The whore business sucked.

The brothers Atho and Harry Ranta were typical: two useless parasites who had found out way too much about the business. Most of all he would like to tie them up with chains and dump them in the harbour. Instead he had driven them to the Estonia ferry and patiently waited until it sailed. Their little vacation was the result of some fucking reporter sticking his nose into their business, and it was decided that they had better make themselves scarce.

He sighed.

Above all he did not appreciate diversions like that Salander girl. She was utterly without interest as far as he was concerned. She represented no profit whatsoever.

He did not like Bjurman, and he could not imagine why they had decided to do what he wanted. But now the ball was rolling. Instructions had been issued, the contract had been awarded to a freelancer from Svavelsjö MC, and he did not like the situation one bit.

He looked out across the dark field, tossing his cigarette butt into the gravel by the gate. He thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and froze. He focused his gaze. There was no light except from a faint crescent moon and the stars, but he could still make out the contours of a black figure creeping towards him about a hundred feet away. The figure advanced, making short pauses.

The man felt a cold sweat on his brow. He hated the creature in the field. For a minute he stared spellbound at its steady approach. When it was close enough that he could see its eyes glimmer in the darkness he spun round and ran to the car. He tore open the door. He felt his panic growing until he got the engine started and turned on the headlights. The creature had come out to the road and at last he could make out features in the beam. It looked like an enormous sting ray slithering along. It had a stinger like a scorpion.

The creature was not of this world. It was a monster from the underworld.

He put the car in gear and screeched off. As he passed the creature he saw it strike, but it did not touch the car. He did not stop shaking until several miles later.

Salander spent the night going over the research that Svensson and Millennium had compiled about trafficking. Gradually she was getting a good overview, even though it was based on cryptic fragments that she had to piece together from their various documents.

Berger sent an email to Blomkvist asking how the confrontations were going; he replied briefly that they could not run the man from the Cheka to earth. Salander took this to mean that one of the people who was going to be hung out to dry worked at Säpo, the Security Police. Eriksson sent a summary of a supplementary research assignment to Svensson with copies to Blomkvist and Berger. Svensson and Blomkvist replied with comments and suggestions. Blomkvist and Svensson exchanged emails a few times each day. Svensson described a confrontation he had had with a journalist, Per-Åke Sandström.

From Svensson’s emails she also saw that he was communicating with a person by the name of Gulbrandsen at a Yahoo address. It took her a while to realize that Gulbrandsen was a policeman and that their exchange was off the record, using a private email address instead of Gulbrandsen’s police address. So Gulbrandsen was a source.

The folder named was disappointingly brief, only three Word documents. The longest of them, just 128 KB, was called [Irina P] and gave a sketch of a prostitute’s life, followed by Svensson’s summary of the autopsy report, his curt outline of her appalling wounds.

She recognized a phrase in the text that was a word-for-word quotation from Johansson’s dissertation. There the woman had been called Tamara, but Irina P. and Tamara had to be one and the same, so she read the interview section of the thesis with great interest.

The second document, [Sandström], contained the summary that Svensson had emailed to Blomkvist, showing that the journalist was one of several johns who had abused a girl from the Baltics, and also that he ran errands for the sex mafia in exchange for drugs and sex. Sandström, besides producing company newsletters, had written freelance articles for a daily newspaper indignantly condemning the sex trade. One of his revelations was that an unnamed Swedish businessman had visited a brothel in Tallinn.

Zala was not mentioned in either document, but Salander assumed that since both were in a folder named there must be a connection. The last document was, however, named [Zala]. It was short and only in note form.

According to Svensson, the name Zala had turned up in nine cases related to drugs, weapons, or prostitution since the mid-nineties. Nobody knew who Zala was, but sources had variously indicated that he was a Serb, a Pole, or perhaps a Czech. All the information was secondhand.

Svensson had discussed Zala exhaustively with source G. (Gulbrandsen?) and suggested that Zala may have been responsible for the murder of Irina P. There was no saying what G. thought about this theory, but there was a note to the effect that Zala had been on the agenda a year earlier at a meeting with “the special investigative group on organized crime.” The name had cropped up so many times that the police had started asking questions, trying to establish whether Zala was a real person, and whether he was still alive.

As far as Svensson could discover, the name Zala had first appeared in connection with the holdup of a security van in Örkelljunga in 1996. The robbers had gotten away with more than 3.3 million kronor, but they had so dramatically botched their getaway that after only twenty-four hours the police were able to identify and arrest the gang members. The following day another arrest was made. It was Nieminen, a member of Svavelsjö MC, whose role had been to supply the weapons used in the holdup.

A week after the robbery in 1996, three more people were arrested. The ring thus included eight people, of whom seven had refused to talk to the police. The eighth, a boy of nineteen named Birger Nordman, had broken down and confessed everything he knew during questioning. The trial turned into a runaway victory for the prosecution. One consequence was (Svensson’s police source suspected) that Nordman was found two years later buried in a sandpit in Värmland after running away during temporary leave from prison.

According to G., the police believed that Nieminen had been the catalyst behind the whole gang. They also believed that Nordman had been killed on contract by Nieminen, who was regarded as dangerous and ruthless, but there was no evidence. While in prison he had apparently had dealings with the Aryan Brotherhood, a Nazi prison organization that in turn was linked to the Wolfpack Brotherhood and to ex-con Hell’s Angels clubs around the world, as well as to other cretinous violent Nazi organizations such as the Swedish Resistance Movement.

What interested Salander, however, was something else entirely. Nordman had admitted to police that the weapons used in the robbery had come from Nieminen, and that he in turn had got them from a Serb not known to Nordman whom he named as “Sala.”

Svensson had taken him for an anonymous figure in the criminal scene and reckoned that “Zala” was a nickname. But he warned that they might be dealing with a particularly cunning criminal who operated under an alias.

The last section contained Sandström’s information on Zala, such as it was. Sandström had once talked on the telephone to someone using that name. The notes did not say what the conversation had been about.

At around 4:00 in the morning Salander shut down her Power-Book and sat on her window seat looking out at Saltsjön. She sat quietly for two hours, smoking one cigarette after another, thinking. She had a number of strategic decisions to make – and she had to do a risk assessment.

She had to find Zala and settle their accounts once and for all.

On Saturday evening the week before Easter, Blomkvist visited an old girlfriend on Slipgatan in the Hornstull neighbourhood. He had, for once, accepted an invitation to a party. She was married now and not remotely interested in Blomkvist as anything more than a friend, but she worked in the media and had just finished a book that had been in gestation for ten years, which dealt with the image of women in the mass media. Blomkvist had contributed to the book, which was why he was invited.

His role had been to do research on one question. He had chosen to examine the equal opportunity policies which the TT wire service, Dagens Nyheter, the TV show Rapport, and a number of other media ostentatiously promoted. Then he checked off how many men and women were in each company’s management above the level of editorial assistant. The results were embarrassing: CEO-man; chairman of the board – man; editor in chief – man; foreign editor – man; managing editor – man… et cetera, until eventually the first woman turned up.

The party was at the author’s house and the people there were mostly those who had helped her with the book. It was a high-spirited evening with good food and relaxed conversation. Blomkvist had meant to go home reasonably early, but many of the guests were old acquaintances he seldom saw. Besides, no-one jabbered on too much about the Wennerström affair. The party went on until around 2:00 on Sunday morning.

Blomkvist saw the night bus drive past before he could make it to the bus stop, but the air was mild and he decided to walk home instead of waiting for the next one. He followed Högalidsgatan to the church and turned up Lundagatan, which instantly awakened old memories.

Blomkvist had kept the promise he’d made in December to stop visiting Lundagatan in the vain hope that Salander might appear. Tonight he stopped on the other side of the street from her building. He longed to ring the doorbell, but he knew how unlikely it was that she would want to see him, let alone at this time of night with no warning.

He shrugged and kept walking towards Zinkensdamm. He had gone about sixty yards when he heard a door open and turned, and then his heart skipped a beat. It was impossible to mistake that skinny body. Salander had just walked out to the street and away from him. She stopped at a parked car.

Blomkvist opened his mouth to call to her when his voice caught in his throat. He saw a man get out of another of the cars parked along the curb. He moved rapidly up behind Salander. Blomkvist could see that he was tall and had a pony tail.

Salander heard a sound and saw a movement out of the corner of her eye just as she was putting the key in the door of the Honda. He was approaching at an angle behind her, and she spun around two seconds before he reached her. She identified him instantly as Carl-Magnus Lundin of Svavelsjö MC, who several days ago had met the blond hulk at Blomberg’s Café.

She gauged him as aggressive and weighing over 265 pounds. She used her keys as brass knuckles and didn’t hesitate a millisecond before, with a movement as swift as a lizard, she slashed a deep wound in his cheek, from the bottom of his nose to his ear. He was flailing at the air as Salander then seemed to sink through the ground.

Blomkvist saw Salander lash out with her fist. At the instant she struck her attacker she dropped to the ground and rolled beneath the car.

Seconds later Salander was up on the other side of the car, ready for fight or flight. She met the enemy’s gaze across the hood and decided on the latter option. Blood was pouring from his cheek. Before he even managed to focus on her she was away across Lundagatan, running towards Högalid Church.

Blomkvist stood paralyzed, his mouth agape, when the attacker suddenly dashed after Salander. He looked like a tank chasing a toy car.

Salander took the steps to upper Lundagatan two at a time. At the top of the stairs she glanced over her shoulder and saw her pursuer reaching the first step. He was fast. She noticed the piles of boards and sand where the local authority had dug up the street.

Lundin was almost up the steps when Salander came into view again. He had time to register that she was throwing something, but he did not have time to react before the sharp-edged cobblestone hit him on the temple. The stone was thrown with considerable force, and it ripped another wound on his face. He could feel himself losing his footing and then the world spun as he fell backwards down the stairs. He managed to break his fall by grabbing the railing, but he had lost several seconds.

Blomkvist’s paralysis dissolved when the man disappeared up the stairs. He started yelling for him to fuck off.

Salander was halfway across the churchyard when she heard Blomkvist’s voice. What the hell? She switched directions and looked over the railing of the terrace. She saw Blomkvist ten feet below her. She hesitated a tenth of a second before she took off again.

At the same time as Blomkvist began to run towards the steps he noticed that a Dodge van was starting up outside Salander’s front door, behind the car she had tried to get into. The vehicle swung out from the curb and passed Blomkvist, going in the direction of Zinkensdamm. He caught a glimpse of a face as it passed. It was too dark to read the licence plate.

Blomkvist caught up with Salander’s pursuer at the top of the steps. The man had stopped and stood motionless, looking around.

Just as Blomkvist got to him he turned and gave him a powerful backhand across the face. Blomkvist was completely unprepared. He tumbled headlong down the steps.

Salander heard Blomkvist’s stifled cry and almost stopped. What the hell is going on? But when she turned she saw Lundin only a hundred feet from her. He’s faster. Shit, he’s going to catch me.

She turned left and ran up several steps to the terrace between two buildings. She reached a courtyard that did not present the least cover and ran as fast as she could to the next corner. She turned right and realized just in time that she would be heading into a blind alley. As she reached the end of the next building she saw Lundin arrive at the top of the steps to the courtyard. She kept running – out of his sight – for another few yards and dived headfirst into a rhododendron bush alongside the building.

She heard Lundin’s heavy footsteps, but she could not see him. She held her breath, pressing herself into the soil beneath the bush.

Lundin passed her hiding place and stopped. He hesitated for ten seconds before jogging around the courtyard. A minute later he came back. He stopped at the same place as before. This time he stood still for thirty seconds. Salander tensed her muscles, poised for instant flight if she were discovered. Then he moved again, passing less than six feet from her. She listened to his steps fade away across the courtyard.

Blomkvist felt pain in his neck and jaw as he got laboriously to his feet, feeling dizzy. He tasted blood from a split lip.

He made his way unsteadily to the top of the steps and looked around. He saw the man with the ponytail running a hundred yards further down the street. The man stopped and peered between the buildings, and then ran across Lundagatan and climbed into the Dodge van. The vehicle sped off towards Zinkensdamm.

Blomkvist walked slowly along the upper part of Lundagatan, looking for Salander. He could not see her anywhere. There was not a living soul. He was astonished how desolate a street in Stockholm can be at 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning in March. After a while he went back to the front door of Salander’s apartment building on lower Lundagatan. As he passed the car where the attack had taken place he stepped on a key ring. He bent to pick it up and saw a shoulder bag under the car.

Blomkvist stood there a long time, waiting, unsure what to do. At last he tried the keys in her door. They did not fit.

Salander stayed under the bush for fifteen minutes, moving only to look at her watch. Just after 3:00 she heard a door open and close and footsteps making for the bicycle shed in the courtyard.

When the sound died away she raised herself slowly to her knees and peered out of the bush. She looked steadily at every nook and cranny in the courtyard, but she saw no sign of Lundin. She walked back to the street, prepared to turn tail at any moment. She stopped at the top of the wall and looked out over Lundagatan, where she saw Blomkvist outside her apartment building. He was holding her bag in his hand.

She stood perfectly still, hidden behind a lamppost when Blomkvist’s gaze swept over the stairs and the wall. He did not see her.

Blomkvist stood outside her door for almost half an hour. She watched him patiently, without moving, until finally he gave up and headed down the hill towards Zinkensdamm. When he was gone she began to think about what had happened.

Kalle Blomkvist.

She could not for the life of her imagine how he had sprung up out of nowhere. Apart from that, the attack was not difficult to account for.

Carl Fucking Magnus Lundin.

Lundin had met the hulk she had seen talking to Bjurman.

Nils Fucking Slimebag Bjurman.

That piece of shit has hired some diabolical alpha male to get me out of the way. And I made it crystal clear to him what the consequences would be.

Salander was seething inside. She was so enraged that she tasted blood in her mouth. Now she was going to have to punish him.