The Girl who played with Fire

CHAPTER 21

Salander spent the first week of the police hunt far from the drama. She remained in peace and quiet in her apartment on Fiskargatan. Her mobile was turned off and the SIM card taken out. She did not intend to use that phone again. Her eyes grew wide with astonishment as she followed the stories in the online editions of the newspapers and on the TV news programmes.

She was irritated by the passport photograph that appeared everywhere. She looked stupid.

Despite her years of striving for anonymity, she had been transformed overnight into one of the most notorious and talked-about individuals in Sweden. She began to realize that a nationwide alert for a short girl suspected of three murders was one of the year’s biggest news stories. She followed the commentary and speculation in the media with amazement, fascinated that confidential documents about her medical history seemed to be accessible to any newsroom that wanted to publish them. One headline in particular awakened buried memories:

ARRESTED FOR

ASSAULT IN GAMLA STAN

A court reporter at TT wire service had scooped his competitors by digging up a medical report that had been written when Salander was arrested for kicking a passenger in the face at Gamla Stan tunnelbana station.

She had been at Odenplan and was on her way back to her foster home in Hägersten. At Rådmansgatan an apparently sober stranger got on the train and immediately focused his attention on her. Later she discovered that he was Karl Evert Norgren, an unemployed former athlete from Gävle. Despite the fact that the carriage was half empty, he sat down next to her and began to bother her. He put his hand on her knee and tried to start a conversation along the lines of “I’ll give you two hundred if you come home with me.” When she ignored him he got pushy and called her a sour old cunt. The fact that she refused to talk to him and had changed seats at T-Centralen had no effect.

As they were approaching Gamla Stan he put his arms around her from behind and pushed them up inside her sweater, whispering in her ear that she was a whore. She replied with an elbow to his eye and then grabbed one of the upright poles, lifted herself up, and kicked him with both heels across the bridge of his nose, which prompted heavy bleeding.

She was dressed as a punk and had blue-dyed hair, so she had little chance to melt into the crowd when the train stopped at the platform. A friend of law and order had grappled with her and held her down on the ground until the police arrived.

She cursed her gender. Nobody would have dared attack her if she had been a man.

She hardly made any attempt to explain why she had kicked Karl Evert Norgren in the face. She didn’t think it was worth trying to explain anything to uniformed authorities. She refused on principle to respond when psychiatrists tried to determine her mental state. As luck would have it, several other passengers had observed the whole course of events, including a persistent woman from Härnösand who happened to be a member of parliament for the Centre Party. The woman testified that Norgren had assaulted Salander before the violence broke out. When it later turned out that Norgren had been convicted for sexual offences twice before, the prosecutor decided to drop the case. But that did not mean that the social welfare report on Salander was set aside. Not long afterwards the district court declared her incompetent, and she ended up under the guardianship of Holger Palmgren, and later Nils Bjurman.

Now all of these intimate and confidential details were on the Net for public consumption. Her personal record was supplemented with colourful descriptions of how she had come into conflict with people around her since elementary school, and how she spent her early teens in a children’s psychiatric clinic.

The diagnoses of Salander in the press varied depending on which edition and which newspaper was doing the reporting. Sometimes she was described as psychotic and sometimes as schizophrenic or paranoid. All the papers subscribed to the view that she was mentally handicapped – after all, she hadn’t been able to finish school. The public should have no doubt that she was unbalanced and inclined to violence.

When it was discovered that Salander was friends with the lesbian Miriam Wu, a frenzy broke out in certain papers. Wu had appeared in Benita Costa’s show at the Gay Pride Festival, a provocative performance in which she was photographed topless wearing leather chaps with suspenders and high-heeled patent-leather boots. She had also written articles for a gay newspaper that were widely quoted, as were the interviews she had given in connection with her appearance in various shows. The combination of mass murder and titillating S&M sex was evidently doing wonders for circulation figures.

Since Wu hadn’t surfaced during that first dramatic week, there was speculation that she too might have fallen victim to Salander’s violence or that she could have been an accomplice. These speculations, however, were restricted for the most part to the unsophisticated Internet chat room “Exile.” On the other hand, several newspapers floated the theory that since Mia Johansson’s thesis dealt with the sex trade, this might be Salander’s motive for the murders, on the grounds that – according to the social welfare agency – she was a prostitute.

At the end of the week the media discovered that Salander also had connections to a group of young women who flirted with Satanism. They called themselves Evil Fingers, and this caused an older male cultural columnist to write about the rootlessness of youth and the dangers that lurk in everything from skinhead culture to hip-hop.

When all the media assertions were put together, the police appeared to be hunting for a psychotic lesbian who had joined a cult of Satanists that propagandized for S&M sex and hated society in general and men in particular. Because Salander had been abroad for the past year, there might be international connections too.

In only one case did Salander react with any great emotion to the media uproar:

“WE WERE SCARED OF HER”

She threatened to kill us,

say teacher and schoolmates

The person making this statement was a former teacher, now a textile artist, named Birgitta Miåås.

Salander had been eleven on the occasion in question. She remembered Miåås as an unpleasant substitute math teacher who time after time had tried to get her to answer a question that she’d already answered correctly, even though the answer key in the textbook said she was wrong. In fact, the textbook was wrong, and as far as Salander was concerned that should have been obvious to everyone. But Miåås had grown more and more obstinate, and Salander became less and less willing to discuss the matter. She sat there pouting until Miåås, out of sheer frustration, grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her to get her attention. Lisbeth responded by throwing the textbook at Miåås’ head, which started a big hullabaloo. She spat and hissed and kicked when her classmates tried to hold on to her.

The article ran as a feature in an evening paper, and allowed space for a sidebar with some quotes and a photograph of a former classmate posing in front of the entrance to her old school. This was David Gustavsson, who now called himself a financial assistant. He claimed that the students were afraid of Salander because “she threatened to kill somebody once.” Salander remembered Gustavsson as one of the biggest bullies in school, a powerful brute with the IQ of a stump, who seldom passed up an opportunity to dish out insults and punches in the hallway. Once he had attacked her behind the gym during lunch break, and as usual she had fought back. From a purely physical standpoint she didn’t have a chance, but her attitude was that death was better than capitulation. The incident deteriorated when a large number of her schoolmates gathered in a circle to watch Gustavsson knock her to the ground over and over again. It had been amusing up to a point, but the stupid girl did not seem to understand what was good for her and refused to back down. She didn’t even cry or beg for mercy. Finally he gave Salander two serious punches that split her lip and knocked the wind out of her. Her schoolmates left her in a miserable heap behind the gym and ran away laughing.

Salander had gone home and licked her wounds. Two days later she came back carrying a bat. In the middle of the playground she slugged Gustavsson in the ear. As he lay there in shock she bent down, pressed the bat to his throat, and whispered in his ear that if he ever touched her again she would kill him. When the teachers discovered what had happened, Gustavsson was taken to the school nurse while Salander was sent to the head teacher for punishment, further comments in her record, and more social welfare reports.

Salander had not thought about either Miåås or Gustavsson for at least fifteen years. She made a mental note to check out what they were up to these days when she had some spare time.

The result of all this press attention was that Salander had become both famous and infamous to the entire Swedish population. Her background was charted, scrutinized, and published down to the most minute detail, from her outbursts in elementary school to her being committed to St.Stefan’s Psychiatric Clinic for Children, outside Uppsala, where she spent more than two years.

She pricked up her ears when chief of staff Dr. Peter Teleborian was interviewed on TV. Salander had last seen him eight years earlier, in connection with the district court hearing regarding her declaration of incompetence. His brow was deeply furrowed and he scratched at a thin beard when he turned to the studio reporter with concern and explained that he was bound by confidentiality and thus could not discuss an individual patient. All he could say was that Salander’s was an extremely complex case, that she required expert care, and that the district court, against his recommendation, had decided to place her under guardianship in society rather than give her the institutional care she needed. It was a scandal, Teleborian claimed. He regretted that three people had now paid with their lives as a result of this misjudgment, and he made sure to get in a few jabs at the cutbacks in psychiatric care that the government had forced through in recent decades.

Salander noted that no newspaper revealed that the most common form of care in the secure ward of the children’s psychiatric hospital, for which Dr. Teleborian was responsible, was to place “unruly and unmanageable patients” in a room that was “free of stimuli.” The room contained only a bed with a restraining belt. The textbook explanation was that unruly children could not receive any “stimuli” that might trigger an outburst.

When she grew older she discovered that there was another term for the same thing. Sensory deprivation. According to the Geneva Conventions, subjecting prisoners to sensory deprivation was classified as inhumane. It was a commonly used element in experiments with brainwashing conducted by various dictatorial regimes, and there was evidence that the political prisoners who confessed to all sorts of crimes during the Moscow trials in the 1930s had been subjected to such treatment.

As Salander watched Teleborian’s face on TV, her heart became a little lump of ice. She wondered whether he still used the same disgusting aftershave. He had been responsible for what was defined as her care. Salander had rapidly come to the realization that an “unruly and unmanageable patient” was equivalent to one who questioned Teleborian’s reasoning and expertise.

She had spent about half of her time at St.Stefan’s strapped to the bed in the “stimulus-free” room.

Teleborian had never touched her sexually. He had never touched her at all, other than in the most innocent situations. On one occasion he had placed a hand on her shoulder as a warning when she lay strapped down in isolation.

She wondered if her teeth marks were still visible on the knuckle of his little finger.

The whole thing had developed into a vicious game, in which Teleborian held all the cards. Her defence had been to ignore him completely whenever he was in the room.

She was twelve when she was transported by two policewomen to St.Stefan’s. It was a few weeks after “All The Evil” had occurred. She remembered every detail. First she had thought that everything would work out somehow. She had tried to explain her version to police officers, social workers, hospital personnel, nurses, doctors, psychiatrists, and even a pastor, who wanted her to pray with him. As she sat in the backseat of the police car and they passed the Wenner-Gren Centre on the way north to Uppsala, she still did not know where they were heading. Nobody told her. That was when she began to sense that nothing would ever work out.

She had tried to explain to Teleborian.

The result of her efforts was that on the night she turned thirteen, she lay strapped to the bed.

Teleborian was the most loathsome and disgusting sadist Salander had ever met in her life, bar none. He outclassed Bjurman by a mile. Bjurman had been unspeakably brutal, but she could handle him. Teleborian, on the other hand, was shielded behind a curtain of documents, assessments, academic honours, and psychiatric mumbo jumbo. Not a single one of his actions could ever be reported or criticized.

He had a state-endorsed mandate to tie down disobedient little girls with leather straps.

And every time Salander lay shackled on her back and he tightened the straps and she met his gaze, she could read his excitement. She knew. And he knew that she knew.

The night she turned thirteen she decided never again to exchange a word with Teleborian or any other psychiatrist or shrink. That was her birthday present to herself. And she had kept her promise. She knew that it infuriated Teleborian and perhaps contributed more than anything else to her being strapped down so tightly night after night. But that was a price she was willing to pay.

She taught herself everything about self-control. She had no more outbursts, nor did she throw things on the days she was released from isolation.

But she refused to talk to doctors.

On the other hand, she spoke politely to the nurses, the kitchen staff, and the cleaning women. This was noted. A friendly nurse whose name was Carolina, and whom Salander trusted up to a point, asked her one day why she acted the way she did. Salander gave her a quizzical look.

Why won’t you talk to the doctors?

Because they don’t listen to what I say.

She was aware that all such comments were entered into her record, documenting that her silence was a completely rational decision.

During her last year at St.Stefan’s, Salander was placed in the isolation cell less often. When it did happen it was always because she had irritated Dr. Teleborian in some way, which she seemed to do as soon as he laid eyes on her. He tried over and over again to break through her obstinate silence and force her to acknowledge his existence.

For a time he prescribed Salander a type of psychiatric drug that made it hard for her to breathe or think, which in turn brought on anxiety. From then on she refused to take her medicine, and this resulted in the decision to force-feed her three tablets a day.

Her resistance was so strong that the staff had to hold her down, pry open her mouth, and then force her to swallow. The first time, Salander immediately stuck her fingers down her throat and vomited her lunch onto the nearest orderly. After that she was given the tablets when she was strapped down, so she learned to throw up without having to stick her fingers down her throat. Her obstinate resistance and the extra work this made for the staff led to a suspension of the medication.

She had just turned fifteen when she was without warning moved back to Stockholm to live once more with a foster family. The change came as a shock to her. At that time Teleborian was not yet running St.Stefan’s. Salander was sure that this was the only reason she had been released. If Teleborian had been given responsibility for the decision, she would still be strapped to the bed in the isolation cell.

Now she was watching him on TV. She wondered if he fantasized about her ending up in his care again, or if she was now too old to arouse him. His reference to the district court’s decision not to institutionalize her provoked the indignation of the interviewer, although apparently he had no idea what questions to ask. There was nobody to contradict Teleborian. The former chief of staff at St.Stefan’s had since died. The district court judge who had presided over Salander’s case, and who now had in part to accept the role as the villain in the drama, had retired and was refusing to comment to the press.

Salander found one of the most astonishing articles in the online edition of a newspaper published in central Sweden. She read it three times before she turned off her computer and lit a cigarette. She sat on her IKEA pillow in the window seat and dejectedly watched the lights outside.

The article went on to describe some episodes that this Johanna remembered. Salander frowned. She could remember neither the episodes nor that she’d had a close friend named Johanna. In fact, she could not recall ever knowing anyone who could be described as a close friend or who tried to draw her into a group at school.

The article did not specify when these episodes were supposed to have taken place, but she had left school when she was twelve. This meant that her concerned childhood friend must have discovered Salander’s bisexuality when she was ten, maybe eleven.

Among the flood of ridiculous articles over the past week, the one quoting Johanna hit her hardest. It was so obviously fabricated. Either the reporter had run across a mythomaniac or he had made up the story himself. She memorized the reporter’s name and added him to the list of subjects for future research.

Not even the more positive reports, ones that criticized society with headlines such as SOCIETY FAILS or SHE NEVER GOT THE HELP SHE NEEDED, could dilute her standing as public enemy number one – a mass murderer who in one fit of insanity had executed three honourable citizens.

Salander read these interpretations of her life with a certain fascination and noted an obvious hole in the public knowledge. Despite apparently unlimited access to the most classified details of her life, the media had completely missed “All The Evil,” which had happened just before her thirteenth birthday. The published information ranged from kindergarten to the age of eleven, and was taken up again when, at the age of fifteen, she was released from the psychiatric clinic.

Somebody within the police investigation must be providing the media with information, but for reasons unknown to Salander, the source had decided to cover up “All The Evil.” This surprised her. If the police wanted to emphasize her penchant for vicious behaviour, then that report in her file would have been the most damning by far. It was the very reason that she was sent to St.Stefan’s.

On Easter Sunday Salander began to follow the police investigation more closely. From what she culled from the media she built a picture of its participants. Prosecutor Richard Ekström was the leader of the preliminary investigation and usually the spokesman at press conferences. The actual investigation was headed by Criminal Inspector Jan Bublanski, a somewhat overweight man in an ill-fitting suit who flanked Ekström when they were speaking to the press.

After a few days she had identified Sonja Modig as the team’s only female detective and the person who had found Bjurman. She noted the names Hans Faste and Curt Andersson, but she missed Jerker Holmberg altogether, as his name was not mentioned in any of the articles. She created a file on her computer for each person on the team and began to fill them with information.

Naturally, information about how the police investigation was proceeding was kept on the computers used by the investigating detectives, and their databases were stored on the server at police headquarters. Salander knew that it would be exceptionally hard to hack into the police intranet, but it was by no means impossible. She had done it before.

When working on an assignment for Armansky several years earlier, she had plotted the structure of the police intranet and assessed the possibility of hacking into the criminal register to make her own entries. She had failed miserably in her attempts to hack in from outside – the police firewalls were too sophisticated and mined with all sorts of traps that might result in unwelcome attention.

The internal police network was a state-of-the-art design with its own cabling, shielded from external connections and the Internet itself. In other words, what she needed was either a police officer who had authorization to access the network or the next best thing – to make the police intranet believe that she was an authorized person. In this respect, fortunately, the police security experts had left a gaping hole. Police stations all around the country had uplinks to the network, and several of them were small local units that were unstaffed at night and often had no burglar alarms or security patrols. The police station in Långvik outside Västerås was one of these. It occupied about 1,400 square feet in the same building that housed the public library and the regional social security office, and it was manned in the daytime by three officers.

At the time Salander had failed in her efforts to hack into the network for the research she was working on, but she had decided it might be worthwhile to spend a little time and energy acquiring access for future research. She had thought over the possibilities and then applied for a summer job at the library in Långvik. In a break from her cleaning duties, it took her about ten minutes to get detailed blueprints of the whole building. She had keys to the building but, understandably, not to the police offices. She had discovered, however, that without much difficulty she could climb through a bathroom window on the third floor that was left open at night in the summer heat. The police station was patrolled by a freelance security firm, and the officer on duty made rounds only once a night. Ridiculous.

It took her about five minutes to find the username and password underneath the police chief’s desk blotter, and one night of experimenting to understand the structure of the network and identify what sort of access he had and what access had been classified as beyond the realm of the local authorities. As a bonus she also got the usernames and passwords of the two local police officers. One of them was thirty-two-year-old Maria Ottosson, and in her computer Salander found out that she had recently applied and been accepted for service as a detective in the fraud division of the Stockholm police. Salander got full administrator rights for Ottosson, who also had left her Dell PC laptop in an unlocked desk drawer. Brilliant. Salander booted up the machine and inserted her CD with the programme Asphyxia 1.0, the very first version of her spy-ware. She downloaded the software in two locations, as an active, integrated part of Microsoft Internet Explorer and as backup in Ottosson’s address book. Salander figured that even if Ottosson bought a new computer, she would copy over her address book, and chances were that she would transfer it to the computer at the fraud division in Stockholm when she reported for duty a few weeks later.

Salander also placed software in the officers’ desktop computers, making it possible for her to gather data from outside and, by simply stealing their identities, to make adjustments to the criminal register. However, she had to proceed with the utmost caution. The police security division had an automatic alarm if any local officer logged on to the network outside working hours or if the number of modifications increased too dramatically. If she fished for information from investigations in which the local police would not normally be involved, it would trigger the alarm.

Over the past year she had worked together with her hacker associate Plague to take control of the police IT network. This proved to be fraught with such difficulty that eventually they gave up the project, but in the process they had accumulated almost a hundred existing police identities that they could borrow at will.

Plague had a breakthrough when he succeeded in hacking into the home computer of the head of the police data security division. He was a civil service economist with no in-depth IT knowledge but with a wealth of information on his laptop. Salander and Plague thereafter had the opportunity, if not to hack into, at least to devastatingly disrupt the police intranet with viruses of various types – an activity in which neither of them had the slightest interest. They were hackers, not saboteurs. They wanted access to functioning networks, not to destroy them.

Salander now checked her list and saw that none of the individuals whose identity she had stolen was working on the investigation into the three murders – that would have been too much to hope for. But she was able to get in without much trouble and read details of the nationwide alert, including updated APBs on herself. She discovered that she had been sighted and pursued in Uppsala, Norrköping, Göteborg, Malmö, Hässleholm, and Kalmar, and that a classified computer image giving a better idea of what she looked like had been circulated.

One of Salander’s few advantages in all the media attention was that not many photographs of her existed. Apart from a four-year-old passport photograph, which was also used on her driver’s licence, and a police mug shot taken when she was eighteen (which did not look anything like her today), there were only pictures from old school yearbooks and photographs taken by a teacher on a field trip to the Nacka nature reserve when she was twelve. The pictures from the field trip showed a blurry figure sitting a little apart from the others.

The passport photograph showed her with staring eyes, her mouth compressed to a thin line, and her head leaning a bit forward. It fitted the image of a retarded, asocial killer, and the media published millions of copies of it. But she now looked so different that very few people would recognize her from it.

She read with interest the profiles of the three murder victims. On Tuesday the media began to tread water, and with the lack of any new or dramatic revelations in the hunt for Salander, interest focused on the victims. Dag Svensson, Mia Johansson, and Nils Bjurman were portrayed in a long article in one of the evening papers.

Nils Bjurman came across as a respected and socially involved lawyer who belonged to Greenpeace and had a “commitment to young people.” A column was devoted to his close friend and colleague Jan Håkansson, who had an office in the same building. Håkansson confirmed the image of Bjurman as a man who fought for the rights of the little people. A civil servant at the Guardianship Agency described him as genuinely committed to his ward.

Salander smiled her first lopsided smile of the day.

Johansson, the female victim in the drama, elicited great interest in the media. She was described as a sweet and enormously intelligent young woman with an already impressive record of achievement and a brilliant career ahead of her. Shocked friends, colleagues at the university, and a tutor had given comments, and the question they had all asked was “why?” Pictures showed flowers and lighted candles outside the door of the apartment building in Enskede.

By comparison, very little space was devoted to Svensson. He was described as a sharp, fearless reporter. But the main interest was in his partner.

Salander noted with mild surprise that it took till Easter Sunday before anyone seemed to realize that Svensson had been working on a big report for Millennium magazine. And even then, there was no mention in the articles about what specifically he was working on.

She never read the quote Blomkvist had sent to Aftonbladet. It was not until late Tuesday, when it was mentioned on the TV news, that she realized Blomkvist was purposely putting out misleading information. He claimed that Svensson had been involved in writing a report on computer security and illegal hacking.

Salander frowned. She knew that was false, and wondered what game Millennium was playing. Then she understood the message and smiled her second lopsided smile of the day. She connected to the server in Holland and double-clicked on the MikBlom/laptop icon. She found the folder and the document [To Sally] prominently displayed in the middle of the desktop. She double-clicked and read it.

Then she sat for a long time staring at Blomkvist’s letter. She wrestled with contradictory feelings. Up until then it had been her against the rest of Sweden, which in its simplicity was quite an elegant and lucid equation. Now suddenly she had an ally, or at least a potential ally, who claimed to believe she was innocent. And of course it would be the only man in Sweden that she never wanted to see again under any circumstances. She sighed. Blomkvist was, as always, a naive do-gooder. Salander hadn’t been innocent since the age of ten.

There are no innocents. There are, however, different degrees of responsibility.

Bjurman was dead because he had chosen not to play according to the rules she had stipulated. He had had every chance, but still he had hired some fucking alpha male to do her harm. That was not her responsibility.

But Kalle Blomkvist’s involvement should not be underrated. He could be useful.

He was good at riddles and he was unmatchably stubborn. She had found that out in Hedestad. When he sank his teeth into something he simply would not let go. He really was naive. But he could move in places where she couldn’t. He might be useful until she could get safely out of the country. Which was what she assumed she would soon be forced to do.

Unfortunately, Blomkvist could not be controlled. He needed a reason of his own to act. And he needed a moral excuse as well.

In other words, he was quite predictable. She thought for a while and then created a new document called [To MikBlom] and wrote a single word.

That would give him something to think about.

She was still sitting there thinking when she noticed that Blomkvist had booted up his computer. His reply came shortly after he read her message:

OK. Time to hook him.

She created another document and called it [Kalle Blomkvist]. She knew that would upset him. Then she wrote a brief message:

As expected, he replied at once with an appeal for her to listen to reason, and he tried to play on her feelings. She smiled and closed her connection to his hard drive.

Now that she had started snooping around, she moved on and opened Armansky’s hard drive. She read the report about herself that he had written the day after Easter. It was not clear to whom the report was addressed, but she assumed that the only reasonable explanation was that Armansky was working with the police to help bring her in.

She spent a while going through Armansky’s email, but found nothing of interest. Just as she was about to disconnect, she lit upon a message to the technical chief at Milton Security with instructions for the installation of a hidden surveillance camera in his office.

Bingo.

She looked at the date and saw that the message was sent about an hour after her social call in February.

That meant she would have to adjust certain routines in the automatic surveillance system before she paid another visit to Armansky’s office.

CHAPTER 22

On Tuesday morning Salander accessed the police criminal register and looked up Alexander Zalachenko. He was not listed, which was not surprising, since as far as she knew he had never been convicted of a crime in Sweden and was not even in the national database.

When she had accessed the criminal register she used the identity of Superintendent Douglas Skiöld of the Malmö police. She got a mild shock when her computer suddenly pinged and an icon in the menu toolbar started blinking to signal that someone was looking for her in the ICQ chat programme.

Her first impulse was to pull the plug and shut down. Then she thought about it. Skiöld had not had the ICQ programme on his machine. Very few older people did.

Which meant that someone was looking for her. And there were not many alternatives to choose from. She clicked on ICQ and typed the words:

Salander hesitated. First Blomkvist and now Plague. Was there no end to all the people coming to her rescue? The problem with Plague was that he was a 350-pound recluse who communicated almost exclusively via the Internet and made Salander look like a miracle of social skills. When she didn’t answer, Plague typed another line:

Lisbeth disconnected from ICQ and sat down on the sofa to think. Ten minutes later she sent an email to Plague’s hotmail address.

She knew that Plague himself seldom left his apartment in Sundbyberg, so she hoped he had cultivated some pimply teenager to do the field work. There was no need to sign the message. She got an answer fifteen minutes later.

On Thursday morning she had one email from Plague containing an FTP address. Salander was amazed. She had not expected a result for at least two weeks. Doing a hostile takeover, even with Plague’s brilliant programme and his specially designed hardware, was a laborious process that required slipping bits of information into a computer one kilobyte at a time until a simple piece of software had been created. How rapidly it could be done depended on how often Ekström used his computer, and then it should normally take another few days to transfer all the data to a mirrored hard drive. Forty-eight hours was not merely exceptional, it was theoretically impossible. Salander was impressed. She pinged his ICQ:

She thought for a moment and then transferred 30,000 kronor to Plague’s account via the Internet. She did not want to frighten him off with excessive amounts. Then she made herself comfortable on her Verksam IKEA chair and opened Ekström’s laptop.

Within an hour she had read all the reports that Inspector Bublanski had sent to Ekström. Salander suspected that, technically, reports like these were not allowed to leave police headquarters. It proved once again the theory that no security system is a match for a stupid employee. Through Ekström’s computer she gleaned several important pieces of information.

First, she discovered that Armansky had assigned two of his staff to join Bublanski’s investigative team without remuneration, which in practice meant that Milton Security was sponsoring the police hunt for her. Their assignment was to assist in the arrest of Salander by all possible means. Thanks a lot, Armansky. I’ll remember that. She frowned when she discovered which employees they were. Bohman she had taken for a straight arrow, and he had been perfectly decent in his behaviour towards her. Hedström was a corrupt nobody who had exploited his position at Milton Security to swindle one of the company’s clients.

Salander had a selective morality. She had nothing at all against swindling the company’s clients herself – provided they deserved it – but if she had accepted a job with a confidentiality agreement in it, she would never have broken it.

Salander soon discovered that the person who had leaked the information to the media was Ekström himself. This was evident from an email in which he answered follow-up questions about both Salander’s psychiatric report and the connection between her and Miriam Wu.

The third significant piece of information was the insight that Bublanski’s team did not have a single lead as to where they should look for Salander. She read with interest a report on what measures had been taken and which addresses had been put under sporadic surveillance. It was a short list. Lundagatan, obviously, but also Blomkvist’s address, Miriam’s old address at St.Eriksplan, and Kvarnen, where they had been seen together. Fuck, why did I have to involve Mimmi? What a mistake that was.

On Friday Ekström’s researchers had also found the link to Evil Fingers. She guessed that would mean more addresses being visited. She frowned. So the girls in the group would vanish from her circle of friends too, even though she had had no contact with them since her return to Sweden.

The more she thought about all this, the more confused she became. Ekström was leaking all kinds of bullshit to the media. His objective was clear. He was building publicity and doing the groundwork for the day when he would issue a charge against her.

But why hadn’t he leaked the police report from 1991, which had led her to be locked up at St.Stefan’s? Why keep that story hidden?

She went into Ekström’s computer again and pored over his documents. When she was finished she lit a cigarette. She had not found a single reference to the events of 1991 on his computer. It was strange, but the only explanation was that he didn’t know about the police report.

For a moment she was at a loss. Then she glanced at her PowerBook. This was precisely the kind of thing that Kalle Fucking Blomkvist could sink his teeth into. She rebooted her computer to access his hard drive and created the document [MB2].

That should be enough to get him going. She sat patiently and waited two hours for Blomkvist to get online. He read his email and it took fifteen minutes before he noticed her document and another five minutes before he replied with the document [Cryptic]. He didn’t bite. Instead he insisted that he wanted to know who murdered his friends.

That was an argument that Salander could understand. She softened a bit and answered with [Cryptic 2].

Which was intended as a personal question. He replied with [Cryptic 3]. It shook her.

Blomkvist’s reference to Teleborian at first made her furious. Then she realized that he was not trying to start a fight. He had no idea who Teleborian was and had probably only seen him on TV, where he came across as a responsible, internationally respected expert.

But what really shook her was the reference to Wennerström’s billions. She had no idea how he had wormed out that information. She was absolutely certain that she had made no mistakes and that nobody in the world could know what she had done.

She read the letter over several times.

The reference to friendship made her uncomfortable. She didn’t know how to respond to it.

A short time later she created [Cryptic 4].

She disconnected and went to her window seat.

Salander had exhausted her supply of Billy’s Pan Pizza as well as the last crumb of bread and rind of cheese. For the last three days she had survived on a packet of instant oats that she had bought on impulse with the vague idea that she ought to eat more nourishing food. She discovered that half a cup of oats with a few raisins and a cup of water turned into an edible portion of hot cereal after a minute in the microwave.

It was not only the lack of food that got her on the move. She had someone to look after. Unfortunately that was not something she could do while holed up in her apartment. She went to her wardrobe and took out the blond wig and Irene Nesser’s Norwegian passport.

Fröken Nesser did exist in real life. She was similar in appearance to Salander and she had lost her passport three years earlier. It came to be in Salander’s hands thanks to Plague, and she had used Nesser’s identity when necessary for almost eighteen months.

Salander took the ring out of her eyebrow and put on makeup at the bathroom mirror. She dressed in dark jeans, a warm brown sweater with yellow trim, and walking boots with heels. She took out a Mace canister from her small supply. She also found her Taser, which she hadn’t touched in a year, and plugged it in to charge. She put a change of clothes in a shoulder bag. And at 11:00 on Friday night, nine days after the murders, Salander left her apartment in Mosebacke.

She walked to McDonald’s on Hornsgatan. It was less likely that any of her former colleagues from Milton Security would run into her there than at the one near Slussen or at Medborgarplatsen. She ate a Big Mac and drank a large Coke.

Then she took the number 4 bus across Västerbron to St.Eriksplan. She walked to Odenplan and found herself outside Bjurman’s apartment building on Upplandsgatan just after midnight. She did not expect the apartment to be under surveillance, but she saw a light in the window of an apartment on the same floor, so she walked on towards Vanadisplan. The light was off when she came back an hour later.

She went up the stairs on tiptoe without turning on the light in the stairwell. With the aid of a Stanley knife she cut the police tape that sealed the apartment. She opened the door without a sound.

She turned on the hall lamp, which she knew could not be seen from the outside, and switched on a pen torch to light her way to the bedroom. The venetian blinds were closed. She played the beam of light over the bloodstained bed. She recalled that she had been very close to dying in that bed and suddenly had a feeling of deep satisfaction that Bjurman was forever out of her life.

The reason for her visit to the crime scene was to get two pieces of information. First, she didn’t understand the connection between Bjurman and Zala. She was convinced there had to be one, but she hadn’t been able to find it from anything she found in Bjurman’s computer.

Second was an inconsistency that kept gnawing at her. During her nighttime visit a few weeks earlier she noticed that Bjurman had taken documentation about her out of the file box where he kept all his guardianship material. The pages that were missing were part of his brief from the agency which summarized Salander’s psychological state in the most concise terms. Bjurman no longer had any need of these pages, and it was possible that he had cleared out the file and thrown them away. On the other hand, lawyers never throw away documents relating to an unfinished case. And yet these papers had once been in the file box relating to her, and she had not found them in his desk or anywhere near it.

She saw that the police had removed the files that dealt with her case, as well as some others. She spent more than two hours searching every inch of the apartment in case the police had missed anything, but eventually she came to the conclusion that they had not.

In the kitchen she found a drawer which contained various keys: car keys, as well as a general key to the building and a padlock key. She quietly went up to the attic floor, where she tried all the padlocks until she found Bjurman’s storage unit. In it was some furniture, as well as a wardrobe full of old clothes, skis, a car battery, cardboard boxes of books, and some other junk. She discovered nothing of interest, so she went back downstairs and used the general key to get into the garage. She worked out which was his Mercedes, but a brief search turned up nothing of value there either.

She did not bother to go to his office. She had been there only a few weeks earlier, around the time of her previous visit to his apartment, and she knew that for the past two years he had hardly used it.

Salander returned to Bjurman’s apartment and sat on his living-room sofa to think. After a few minutes she got up and went back to the key drawer in the kitchen. She studied the keys one by one. One set belonged to front-door and dead-bolt locks, but another key was rusty and old-fashioned. She frowned. Then she raised her eyes to a shelf above the kitchen counter, where Bjurman had put about twenty seed packets, seeds for an herb garden.

He has a summer cabin. Or an allotment somewhere. That’s what I missed.

It took her three minutes to locate a receipt, six years old, in Bjurman’s account book showing that he had paid for work on his driveway, and it took another minute to find an insurance policy for a property near Stallarholmen outside Mariefred.

At 5:00 in the morning she stopped at the twenty-four-hour 7-Eleven at the top of Hantverkargatan up by Fridhemsplan. She bought an armful of Billy’s Pan Pizzas, some milk, bread, cheese, and other staples. She also bought a morning paper with a headline that fascinated her.

This particular paper did not, for some reason, name her. She was referred to instead as the “26-year-old woman.” The article stated that a source within the police claimed that she might have escaped abroad and could now be in Berlin. The police had apparently received a tip that she had been seen in Kreuzberg at an “anarcho-feminist club” described as a hangout for young people associated with everything from terrorism to antiglobalization and Satanism.

She took the number 4 bus back to Södermalm, where she got off at Rosenlundsgatan and walked home to Mosebacke. She made coffee and had a sandwich before she went to bed.

She slept until late in the afternoon. When she woke she took stock and decided that it was high time she changed the sheets. She spent the evening cleaning her apartment. She took out the trash and collected newspapers in two plastic bags and put them in a closet in the stairwell. She washed a load of underwear and T-shirts and then a load of jeans. She filled the dishwasher and turned it on. Then she vacuumed and mopped the floor.

It was 9:00 p.m. and she was drenched with sweat. She turned on the faucet in the tub and poured in plenty of bubble bath. She lay back and closed her eyes and brooded. When she woke up, it was midnight and the water was cold. She got out, dried off, and went back to bed. She fell asleep almost immediately.

On Sunday morning Salander was filled with rage when she booted up her PowerBook and read all the stupid things that had been written about Miriam Wu. She felt miserable and guilty. Wu’s only crime was that she was Salander’s… acquaintance? Friend? Lover?

She didn’t quite know which word would describe her relationship with Mimmi, but she realized that whichever one she chose, it was probably over. She would have to cross one more name off her already short list of acquaintances. After all the shit written in the press, she could not imagine that her friend would want to have anything to do with that psychotic Salander woman ever again.

It made her furious.

She committed to memory the name of Tony Scala, the journalist who had started it all. She also resolved one day to confront a nasty columnist pictured in a checked jacket whose article had made repeated jocular references to Mimmi as an “S&M dyke.”

The number of people Salander was going to have to deal with was growing. But first she had to find Zala.

What would happen when she found him she didn’t know.

Blomkvist was woken by the telephone at 7:30 on Sunday morning. He stretched out his hand and answered it sleepily.

“Good morning,” Berger said.

“Mmm,” said Mikael.

“Are you alone?”

“Unfortunately.”

“Then I suggest you take a shower and put on some coffee. You’ll have a visitor in fifteen minutes.”

“I will?”

“Paolo Roberto.”

“The boxer? The king of kings?”

“He called me and we talked for half an hour.”

“How come?”

“How come he called me? Well, we know each other well enough to say hello. I did an interview with him when he was in Hildebrand’s film, and we’ve run into each other a few times over the years.”

“I didn’t know that. But my question was why is he visiting me?”

“Because… well, I think it’s better if he explains that himself.”

Blomkvist had only just showered and put on his pants when the doorbell rang. He opened the door and asked the boxer to take a seat at the table while he found a clean shirt and made two double espressos, which he served with a teaspoon of milk. Paolo Roberto inspected the coffee, impressed.

“You wanted to talk to me?” Blomkvist said.

“It was Erika Berger’s suggestion.”

“I see. Talk away.”

“I know Lisbeth Salander.”

Blomkvist raised his eyebrows. “You do?”

“I was a little surprised when Erika told me that you knew her too.”

“I think perhaps it would be better if you started at the beginning.”

“OK. Here’s the deal. I came home the day before yesterday after a month in New York and found Lisbeth’s face on every fucking newspaper in town. The papers are writing a load of fucking crap about her. And not one of those fuckers seems to have a good word to say.”

“You got three fucks into that outburst.”

Paolo Roberto laughed. “Sorry. But I’m really pissed off. In fact, I called Erika because I needed to talk and didn’t really know who else to call. Since that journalist in Enskede worked for Millennium and since I happen to know Erika, I called her.”

“So?”

“Even if Salander went completely off her rocker and did everything the police are claiming she did, she has to be given a sporting chance. We do happen to have the rule of law in this country, and nobody should be condemned without their day in court.”

“I believe that too.”

“That’s what I understood from Erika. When I called her I thought that you guys at Millennium were after her scalp too, considering that the Svensson guy was writing for you. But Erika said you thought she was innocent.”

“I know Lisbeth. I can’t see her as a deranged killer.”

Paolo Roberto laughed out loud. “She’s one fucking freaky chick… but she’s one of the good ones. I like her.”

“How do you know her?”

“I’ve boxed with Salander since she was seventeen.”

Blomkvist closed his eyes for ten seconds before he opened them and looked at the boxing champ. Salander was, as always, full of surprises.

“Of course. Lisbeth Salander boxes with Paolo Roberto. You’re in the same division.”

“I’m not joking.”

“I believe you. She told me once that she used to spar with the boys at some boxing club.”

“Let me tell you how it happened. Ten years ago I took a job as a trainer for juniors who wanted to start boxing down at the Zinken club. I was already established, and the club’s junior leader thought I’d be a big draw, so I’d come in afternoons and spar with the guys. As it turned out, I stayed the whole summer and part of the autumn too. They ran a campaign and put up posters and all that, trying to lure the local kids. And it did attract a lot of fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds and some a few years older too. Quite a few immigrant kids. Boxing is a great alternative to running around town and raising hell. Ask me. I know.”

“I believe you.”

“Then one day in the middle of summer this skinny girl turns up out of nowhere. You know how she looks, right? She came into the club and said she wanted to learn to box.”

“I can picture the scene.”

“There was a roar of laughter from half a dozen guys who weighed about twice as much as she did and were obviously a whole lot bigger. I laughed too. It was nothing serious, but we teased her a little. We have a girls’ section too, and I said something stupid about the fact that little chicks were only allowed to box on Thursdays or something like that.”

“She didn’t laugh, I bet.”

“No. She didn’t laugh. She looked at me with those black eyes of hers. Then she reached for a pair of boxing gloves that somebody had left lying around. They weren’t tied up or anything and they were way too big for her. But we weren’t laughing any more. You know what I mean?”

“This doesn’t sound good.”

Paolo Roberto laughed again. “Since I was the instructor I went up and pretended to jab at her, you know, for make-believe.”

“Uh-oh…”

“Right. All of a sudden she whipped out a punch that caught me smack above my mouth. I was just clowning with her and was totally unprepared. She got in two or three punches before I even began to block them. Anyway, she had no muscle strength and it was like being walloped by a feather. But when I started blocking she changed tactics. She boxed instinctively and landed a few more smacks. Then I started blocking seriously and found out that she was quicker than a fucking lizard. If she had been bigger and stronger I would have had a match on my hands.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“And then she switched tactics again and whacked me a good one right in the balls. I felt that one.”

Blomkvist winced.

“Then I jabbed back and got her in the face. I mean, it wasn’t a hard punch or anything, just a pop. Then she kicked me in the shin. Anyway, it was totally freaky. I was three times bigger and heavier and she didn’t have a chance, but she bashed at me as if her life was at stake.”

“You made her angry.”

“I realized that later. And I was ashamed. I mean… we had put up posters and tried to draw in young people, and here she came and asked quite seriously to learn to box, and ran up against a gang of guys who just stood there and made fun of her. I would have lost it, too, if anyone had treated me that way.”

“But you might have thought twice about having a crack at Paolo Roberto!”

“Well, Salander’s problem was that her punches were worthless. So I started training with her. We had her in the girls’ section for a couple of weeks, and she lost several matches because sooner or later somebody would always get a punch in, and then we had to sort of stop and carry her into the locker room because she was so mad and started kicking and biting and slugging us.”

“That sounds like Lisbeth.”

“She never gave up. But finally she had pissed off so many girls that their trainer kicked her out.”

“And then?”

“It was completely impossible to box with her. She only had one style, which we called Terminator Mode. She would try to nail her opponent, and it didn’t matter if it was just a warm-up or friendly sparring. And girls kept going home all scraped up because she had kicked them. That was when I had an idea. I had problems with a guy called Samir. He was seventeen and from Syria. He was a good boxer, powerfully built and with a good jab… but he couldn’t move. He stood still the whole time. So I asked Salander to come to the club one afternoon when I was going to train him. She changed and I put her in the ring with him, headgear and mouthpiece and everything. At first Samir refused to spar with her because she was ‘just a fucking chick,’ all the usual macho crap. So I told him, loud so everyone could hear, that this was no sparring match, and I put up 500 kronor that said she would nail him. To Salander I said that this was no training session and that Samir would pound her in bloody earnest. She looked at me with mistrust. Samir was still standing there babbling when the bell went off. Lisbeth went at him for king and country and thumped him one in the face so he went down on his ass. By then I’d been training her for a whole summer and she was starting to get some muscles and a little power in her punch.”

“I bet your Syrian boy was happy.”

“Well, they talked about that match for months afterwards. Samir took a licking. She won on points. If she’d had more body strength she really could have hurt him. After a while Samir was so frustrated that he started slugging away full force. I was dead afraid he might actually land a punch and we’d have to call an ambulance. She took some bruises when she blocked with her shoulders a few times, and he managed to get her on the ropes because she couldn’t stand up to the force of his blows. But he was nowhere near hitting her for real.”

“I wish I’d seen that.”

“That day the guys in the club began to respect Salander. Especially Samir. So I started putting her in the ring to spar with considerably bigger and heavier guys. She was my secret weapon and it was great training. We arranged sessions so that Lisbeth’s goal was to land five punches on various parts of the body – jaw, forehead, stomach, and so on. And the guys she boxed with had to defend themselves and protect those areas. It turned into sort of a prestige thing to have boxed with Salander. It was like scrapping with a hornet. We actually called her ‘the Wasp,’ and she became like the mascot of the club. I think she even liked it, because one day she came to the club with a wasp tattooed on her neck.”

Blomkvist smiled. He remembered the wasp well. And it was part of the police description of her.

“How long did all this go on?”

“One evening a week for about three years. I was there full-time during that summer and then sporadically after that. The guy who kept up the training with Salander was our junior trainer, Putte Karlsson. Then Salander started working and didn’t have time to come as often, but up until last year she’d be there at least once a month. I saw her a few times a year and did sparring sessions with her. It was good training, and we were sweaty afterwards. She hardly ever talked to anyone. When there was no sparring she would work the heavy bag intensely for two hours, as if it were her mortal enemy.”

CHAPTER 23

Blomkvist made two more espressos. He apologized when he lit a cigarette. Paolo Roberto shrugged.

He had the public reputation of being a cocky type who would say exactly what he thought. Blomkvist quickly saw that he was just as cocky in private, but that he was an intelligent and modest human being. He reminded himself that Paolo Roberto had also made a bid for a political career as a Social Democrat candidate for parliament. He definitely had something between his ears. Blomkvist found he was beginning to like him.

“Why are you coming to me with this story?”

“That girl’s really in the soup, right? I don’t know what to do, but she probably could use a friend in her corner.”

“I agree.”

“Why do you think she’s innocent?”

“It’s hard to explain. Lisbeth is an uncompromising person, but I just don’t believe the story that she could have shot Dag and Mia. Especially not Mia. For one thing, she had no motive –”

“At least none that we know of.”

“Fair enough. Lisbeth would have no problem using violence against somebody who deserved it. But I don’t know. I’ve decided to challenge Bublanski, the detective in charge of the investigation. I think there’s a reason why Dag and Mia were murdered. And I think the reason is somewhere in the story Dag was working on.”

“If you’re right, Salander will need more than a hand to hold when she’s arrested – she’ll need a whole other kind of support.”

“I know.”

Paolo Roberto had a dangerous glint in his eye. “If she’s innocent she’s been subjected to one of the worst fucking legal scandals in history. She’s been painted as a murderer by the media and the police, and after all the shit that’s been written…”

“I know.”

“What can we do? Can I help out somehow?”

“The best help we could offer would be to find an alternative suspect. That’s what I’m working on. The next best thing would be to get to her before some police thug shoots her dead. Lisbeth isn’t the type of person who would give herself up voluntarily.”

“So how do we find her?”

“I don’t know. But there is one thing you could do. Something practical, if you have the time and energy.”

“My girlfriend is away all week. So I do have the time and the energy.”

“Well, I was thinking that since you’re a boxer…”

“Yes?”

“Lisbeth has a girlfriend, Miriam Wu. You’ve probably read about her.”

“Better known as the S&M dyke… Yeah, I’ve read about her.”

“I have her mobile number and I’ve been trying to get hold of her. She hangs up as soon as she hears it’s a reporter.”

“I don’t blame her.”

“I don’t really have time to chase after Fröken Wu. But I read somewhere that she trains in kickboxing. I was thinking that if a famous boxer wanted to get in touch with her…”

“I’m with you. And you’re hoping that she might provide a lead to Salander.”

“When the police interviewed her she said she had no idea where Lisbeth was staying. But it’s worth a try.”

“Give me her number. I’ll talk to her.”

Blomkvist gave him the number and the address on Lundagatan.

Björck had spent the weekend analysing his situation. His prospects, he decided, were hanging by a fraying thread, and he would have to make the most of the hand he’d been dealt.

Blomkvist was a fucking swine. The only question was whether he could be persuaded to keep his mouth shut about… about the fact that Björck had hired the services of those bitches. It was a chargeable offence, and he would be fired if it were made public. The press would rip him to shreds. A member of the Security Police who exploited teenage prostitutes… If only those fucking cunts hadn’t been so young.

Sitting here doing nothing would certainly seal his fate. Björck was smart enough not to have said anything to Blomkvist. He had read his expression. The man was in agony. He wanted information. But he was going to be forced to pay for it, and the price was his silence.

Zala brought a whole new dimension to the murder investigation.

Svensson had been hunting Zala.

Bjurman had been hunting Zala.

And Superintendent Björck was the only one who knew that there was a link between Zala and Bjurman, which meant that Zala was a clue to the murders at Enskede and Odenplan.

This created another serious problem for Björck’s future well-being. He was the one who had given Bjurman the information about Zalachenko – as a friendly gesture and in spite of the fact that the file was still top secret. That was a detail, but it meant that he had committed another chargeable offence.

Furthermore, since Blomkvist’s visit on Friday he had involved himself in yet one more crime. As a police officer, if he had information in a murder investigation it was his duty to inform his colleagues immediately. But if he gave the information to Bublanski or Ekström, he would implicate himself. It would all eventually come out. Not just the whores, but the whole Zalachenko affair.

On Saturday he had gone to his office at the Security Police on Kungsholmen. He had picked out all the old documents about Zalachenko and read through them. He was the one who had written the reports, but it was many years ago. The oldest of the documents were almost thirty years old. The most recent was ten years old.

Zalachenko.

A slippery fucker.

Zala.

Björck himself had called him that in his report, although he could not remember ever having used the name.

But the connection was crystal clear. To Enskede. To Bjurman. And to Salander.

Björck still did not understand how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, but he thought he knew why Salander had been in Enskede. He could also easily imagine her flying into a rage and killing Svensson and Johansson, either because they had refused to cooperate or because they had provoked her. She had a motive, known only to Björck and perhaps two or three other people in the whole country.

She is completely insane. I hope to God that some officer shoots her dead when she’s apprehended. She knows. She could break the whole story wide open if she talked.

No matter how Björck looked at his situation, Blomkvist was his only possible way out. And that was the one thing that mattered to him. He felt a growing desperation. Blomkvist had to be persuaded to treat him as a confidential source and to keep quiet about his… foolish escapades with those fucking whores. Damn, if only Salander would blow Blomkvist’s head off too.

He looked at Zalachenko’s phone number and weighed the pros and cons of contacting him. He was incapable of making up his mind.

Blomkvist had made a point, at every stage, of summing up his thinking on the investigation. When Paolo Roberto left, he spent an hour on the task. It had turned into a journal in which he let his thoughts run free while at the same time he meticulously wrote up every conversation and every meeting, as well as all the research he was doing. He encrypted the document using PGP and emailed copies to Berger and Eriksson, so that his colleagues were kept up to date.

Svensson had concentrated on Zala in the last weeks of his life. The name had cropped up in his final telephone conversation with Blomkvist three hours before he was killed. Björck claimed to know something about Zala.

Blomkvist ran through everything he had unearthed about Björck, which was not very much.

Gunnar Björck was sixty-two years old, unmarried, born in Falun. Had been in the police force since he was twenty-one. Began as a patrol officer, but studied law and ended up in Säpo, the Security Police, when he was twenty-six or twenty-seven. That was in 1969 or 1970, just at the end of Per Gunnar Vinge’s time as chief there.

Vinge was dismissed after making the claim in a conversation with Ragnar Lassinanti, the governor of Norrbotten County, that Olof Palme was spying for the Russians. Then came the Internal Bureau affair, and Holmér, and the Letter Carrier, and the Palme assassination, and one scandal after another.

Björck’s career between 1970 and 1985 was largely undocumented, which was not so odd, since anything that had to do with Säpo activities was confidential. He could have been sharpening pencils in the stationery department or he could have been a secret agent in China.

In October 1985 Björck moved to the Swedish Embassy in Washington for two years. In 1988, back with Säpo in Stockholm. In 1996 he became a public figure: appointed deputy bureau chief of the immigration division (whatever that entailed). After 1996 he made various statements to the media, in connection with the deportation of suspect Arabs, and drew particular attention in 1998 when several Iraqi diplomats were expelled.

What does any of this have to do with Salander and the murders of Svensson and Johansson? Maybe nothing.

But Björck knows about Zala.

There has to be a connection.

Berger told no-one, not even her husband, from whom she rarely kept secrets, that she was going to Svenska Morgon-Posten. She had about a month left at Millennium. The anxiety was getting to her. The days would rush by and suddenly she would be facing her last day there.

She was also growing uneasy about Blomkvist. She had read his latest email with a sinking feeling. She recognized the signs. It was the same stubbornness that made him stick it out in Hedestad two years ago, the same obsessive determination with which he had gone after Wennerström. Since Maundy Thursday, nothing had existed for him but to find out who had murdered his friends and somehow to establish Salander’s innocence.

She fully sympathized with his objectives – Dag and Mia had been her friends too – but there was a side to Blomkvist that made her uncomfortable. He could become ruthless when he smelled blood.

From the moment he had called her the day before and told her how he had challenged Bublanski and begun sizing him up like some fucking macho cowboy, she knew that the hunt for Salander would keep Blomkvist busy for the foreseeable future. She knew from experience that he would be impossible to deal with until he solved the problem. He would vacillate between self-absorption and depression. And somewhere in the equation he would also take risks that were probably utterly unnecessary.

And Salander. Berger had met her only once, and she didn’t know enough about that strange girl to share Blomkvist’s certainty that she was innocent. What if Bublanski was right? What if she was guilty? What if Blomkvist did manage to track her down and she turned out to be a lunatic armed with a gun?

Nor had Paolo Roberto’s astonishing conversation earlier that morning been reassuring. It was good, of course, that Blomkvist was not the only one on Salander’s side, but Paolo was a cowboy too.

And where was she going to find someone to replace her at Millennium? It was now becoming urgent. She thought of discussing the matter with Malm, but she couldn’t tell him and still keep the news from Blomkvist.

Blomkvist was a brilliant reporter, but he would be a disaster as editor in chief. She and Malm were much more alike, but she was not at all sure that he would accept the offer. Eriksson was too young, not confident enough yet. Nilsson was too self-absorbed. Cortez was a good reporter, but he was way too inexperienced. Lotta Karim was too flaky. And Berger could not be sure that Malm or Blomkvist would be happy with someone recruited from the outside.

It was a hell of a mess. Not at all the way she wanted to end her tenure at Millennium.

On Sunday evening Salander opened Asphyxia 1.3 and went into the mirrored hard drive of MikBlom/laptop. He was not online and she read through the material that had been added in the past two days.

She read Blomkvist’s research journal and wondered whether he might be writing it in such detail for her sake, and if so, what that could mean. He knew that she was accessing his computer, so it was natural to conclude that he wanted her to read what he wrote. The real question, however, was what he was not writing. Since he knew she was accessing his machine, he could manipulate the flow of information. She noted in passing that he apparently hadn’t gotten much further with Bublanski than challenging him to some sort of a duel over her innocence. This annoyed her. Blomkvist was basing his conclusions on emotion rather than on facts. What a naive idiot.

But he had also zeroed in on Zala. Good thinking, Kalle Blomkvist.

Then she noticed with mild surprise that Paolo Roberto had popped up on the scene. That was good news. She smiled. She liked that cocky fucker. He was macho to his fingertips. He used to give her a pretty good drubbing when they met in the ring. The few times he managed to connect, that is.

Then she sat up in her chair when she decrypted and read Blomkvist’s most recent email to Berger.

Gunnar Björck. Säpo. Knows about Zala.

Björck knows Bjurman.

Salander’s eyes went blurry as she sketched a triangle in her mind. Zala. Bjurman. Björck. Yes, that makes sense. She had never looked at the problem from that perspective before. Maybe Blomkvist wasn’t so dumb after all. But of course he had not worked out the connection. She had not even done that herself, even though she had a lot more insight into what had happened. She thought for a while about Bjurman and realized that the fact he knew Björck turned him into a bigger roadblock than she had previously imagined.

She also realized that she would probably have to pay a visit to Smådalarö.

Then she went into Blomkvist’s hard drive and created a new document in the folder which she called [Ring corner]. He would see it the next time he switched on his iBook.

Blomkvist found Salander’s document some three hours later. He read the message line by line at least five times. For the first time she had clearly stated that she did not murder Svensson and Johansson. He believed her and felt enormous relief. And finally she was talking to him, although as cryptically as ever.

He also noted that she denied murdering Dag and Mia, but she said nothing about Bjurman. Which Blomkvist assumed was because he had mentioned only the two of them in his message. He thought for a while and then created [Ring corner 2].

The reply, when it came, said:

Prosecutor Ekström was in a foul mood when Bublanski’s team gathered for the morning meeting on Monday. More than a week’s searching for a named suspect with a distinctive appearance had produced no result. Ekström’s mood did not improve when Andersson, who had been on duty over the weekend, told him of the latest development.

“A break-in?” Ekström said with undisguised amazement.

“The neighbour called on Sunday evening to say that the police tape on Bjurman’s door had been cut. I checked on it.”

“And?”

“The tape was cut in three places. Probably a razor blade or a Stanley knife. A slick job. It was hard to see.”

“A burglary? There are hooligans who specialize in dead people’s apartments –”

“Not a burglary. I went through the apartment. All the valuables, DVD player and such, were still there. But Bjurman’s car key was lying on the kitchen table.”

“Car key?”

“Jerker was in the apartment on Wednesday to check if we’d missed something. He also checked the car. He swears there wasn’t a car key on the kitchen table when he left the apartment and put the tape back up.”

“Could he have forgotten and left it out? Nobody’s perfect.”

“Jerker never used that key. He used the one on Bjurman’s key ring, which we had already confiscated.”

Bublanski stroked his chin. “So, not a normal break-in then.”

“Someone got into Bjurman’s apartment and sniffed around. It must have happened between Wednesday and Sunday evening, when the neighbour telephoned.”

“Somebody was looking for something. What? Jerker?”

“There’s nothing of any interest left in there, nothing that we didn’t already confiscate.”

“Nothing that we know of, at least. The motive for the murder is still unclear. We assume that Salander is a psychopath, but even psychopaths need motives.”

“What do you suggest?”

“I don’t know. Someone searched Bjurman’s apartment. First question: Who? Second question: Why? What was it we missed?”

“Jerker?”

Holmberg gave a resigned sigh. “OK. I’ll go through the apartment. This time with tweezers.”

Salander woke up at 11:00 on Monday morning. She lay dozing for about half an hour before she got up, put on coffee, and took a shower. Then she made herself some breakfast and sat down at her PowerBook for an update on what was happening in Prosecutor Ekström’s computer and to read the online editions of the papers. Interest in the Enskede murders had evidently declined. Then she opened Svensson’s research folder and read through his notes from his meeting with the journalist Per-Åke Sandström, the john who ran errands for the sex mafia and who knew something about Zala. When she was finished, she poured herself more coffee and sat in her window seat to think.

By 4:00 she had thought enough.

She needed cash. She had three credit cards. One of them was in her own name and so for all practical purposes useless. One was issued to Irene Nesser, but she wanted to avoid using it since identifying herself with Irene Nesser’s passport would be risky. One was issued to Wasp Enterprises and was linked to an account that held about three million kronor and could be replenished with transfers via the Internet. Anyone could use the card, but they would have to identify themselves.

She went into the kitchen, opened a biscuit tin, and took out a wad of banknotes. She had 950 kronor in cash, not a whole lot. Fortunately she also had 1,800 American dollars that had been lying around since she returned from her travels; she could exchange them without ID at a Forex currency window. That improved the situation.

She put on Irene Nesser’s wig, dressed up, and put a change of clothes and a box of theatre makeup in a backpack. Then she set off on her second expedition from Mosebacke. She walked to Folkungagatan and then down to Erstagatan, and got to the Watski shop just before closing time. She bought electrical tape and a block and tackle with eight yards of cotton rope.

She took the number 66 bus back. At Medborgarplatsen she saw a woman waiting for the bus. She did not recognize her at first, but an alarm went off in the back of her mind, and when she looked again she realized that the woman was Irene Flemström, the salaries clerk at Milton Security. She had a new, trendier hairdo. Salander slipped off the bus as Flemström got on. She looked around carefully, searching as always for faces that might be familiar. She walked past the semicircular Bofills Båge apartment building to Södra station and took the local train north.

Inspector Modig shook hands with Berger, who immediately offered her some coffee. She noticed that all the mugs in the kitchenette had logos and ads for political parties and professional organizations.

“They’re mostly from election-night parties and interviews,” Berger explained, handing her a Liberal Youth Party mug.

Modig worked at Svensson’s old desk. Eriksson offered to help, both in explaining what Svensson’s book and article were about and in navigating the research material. Modig was impressed by the scope of it. It had been an irritation for the investigative team that Svensson’s computer was missing and that his work seemed inaccessible. But in fact backups had been made of most of it and had been available all along at the Millennium offices.

Blomkvist was not in the office, but Berger gave Modig a list of the material he had taken from Svensson’s desk, which dealt exclusively with the identity of sources. Modig called Bublanski and explained the situation. They decided that all the material on Svensson’s desk, including Millennium’s computer, would have to be confiscated and that Bublanski would return with a warrant if necessary to requisition the material that Blomkvist had already removed. Modig then drew up a confiscation inventory, and Cortez helped her carry the cardboard boxes down to her car.

On Monday evening Blomkvist was feeling deeply frustrated. He had now checked off ten of the names Svensson had intended to expose. In each instance he had encountered worried, excitable, and shocked men. He estimated their average income at around 400,000 kronor a year. They were a group of pathetic, frightened individuals.

He had not felt, however, that any of them had anything to hide with respect to the murders.

Blomkvist opened his iBook to check whether he had a new message from Salander. He did not. In her previous note she had said that the johns were of no interest and that he was wasting his time with them. He cursed her with a string of expletives. He was hungry, but he did not feel like making himself supper. Besides, he hadn’t been shopping for two weeks, except to buy milk from the corner store. He put on his jacket and went down to the Greek taverna on Hornsgatan and ordered the grilled lamb.

Salander first took a look at the stairwell and at dusk made two cautious circuits of the adjacent buildings. They were low-frame buildings that she suspected were not soundproof and hardly ideal for her purposes. The journalist Sandström lived in a corner apartment on the fourth floor, the highest. Then the stairwell continued up to an attic door. It would have to do.

The problem was that there was no light in any of the apartment’s windows.

She walked to a pizzeria a few streets away, where she ordered a Hawaiian and sat in a corner to read the evening papers. Just before 9:00 she bought a caffè latte at the Pressbyrå kiosk and returned to the building. The apartment was still in darkness. She entered the stairwell and sat on the steps to the attic. From there she had a view of Sandström’s door half a flight down. She drank her latte while she waited.

Inspector Faste finally tracked down Cilla Norén, lead singer of the Satanist group Evil Fingers, at the studio of Recent Trash Records in an industrial building in Älvsjö. It was a cultural collision of about the same magnitude as the Spanish first encountering the Carib Indians.

After several futile attempts at Norén’s parents’ house, Faste had succeeded at the studio, where according to her sister she was “helping out” with the production of a CD by the band Cold Wax from Borlänge. Faste had never heard of the band, which seemed to consist of guys in their twenties. As soon as he entered the corridor outside the studio he was met by a wall of sound that took his breath away. He watched Cold Wax through a window and waited until there was a pause in the cacophony.

Norén had raven black hair with red and green braids and black eye makeup. She was on the chubby side and wore a short skirt and top which revealed a pierced belly button. She had a belt full of rivets around her hips and looked like something out of a French horror movie.

Faste held up his police ID and said he needed to talk to her. She went on chewing gum and gave him a sceptical look. She pointed to a door and led him into a sort of canteen, where he tripped and almost fell over a bag of trash that had been dumped right by the door. Norén ran water into an empty plastic bottle, drank about half of it, and then sat down at a table and lit a cigarette. She fixed Faste with her clear blue eyes.

“What is Recent Trash Records?”

She seemed bored out of her skull.

“It’s a record company that produces new bands.”

“What’s your role here?”

“I’m the sound engineer.”

Faste gave her a hard look. “Are you trained to do that?”

“Nope. I taught myself.”

“Can you make a living from it?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m just curious. I assume you’ve read about Lisbeth Salander in the papers lately.”

She nodded.

“We believe that you know her. Is that correct?”

“Could be.”

“Is it correct or not correct?”

“It depends what you’re looking for.”

“I’m looking for an insane woman who committed a triple murder. I want information about Lisbeth Salander.”

“I haven’t heard from Lisbeth since last year.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Sometime in the fall two years ago. At Kvarnen. She used to hang out there, but then she stopped coming.”

“Have you tried to get in touch with her?”

“I’ve called her mobile a few times. The number’s been disconnected.”

“And you don’t know how to get hold of her otherwise?”

“No.”

“What is Evil Fingers?”

Norén looked amused. “Don’t you read the papers?”

“What does that mean?”

“They say we’re a Satanist band.”

“Are you?”

“Do I look like a Satanist?”

“What does a Satanist look like?”

“Well, I don’t know who’s dumber – the police or the newspapers.”

“Listen here, young lady, this is a very serious matter.”

“Whether we’re Satanists or not?”

“Stop screwing around and answer the question.”

“And what was the question?”

Faste closed his eyes for a second and thought about a visit he had paid to the police in Greece when he was on vacation some years earlier. The Greek police, despite all their problems, had one big advantage compared to the Swedish police. If this young woman had taken the same attitude over there he would have been able to bend her over and give her three whacks with a baton. He looked at her.

“Was Lisbeth Salander a member of Evil Fingers?”

“I wouldn’t think so.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Lisbeth is probably the most tone-deaf person I’ve ever met.”

“Tone-deaf?”

“She can tell the difference between trumpet and drums, but that’s about as far as her musical talent stretches.”

“I mean, was she in the group Evil Fingers?”

“And I just answered your question. What the hell do you think Evil Fingers is?”

“You tell me.”

“You’re running a police investigation by reading idiotic newspaper articles.”

“Answer the question.”

“Evil Fingers was a rock band. We were a bunch of girls in the mid-nineties who liked hard rock and played for fun. We promoted ourselves with a pentagram and a little ‘Sympathy for the Devil.’ Then the band broke up, and I’m the only one who’s still working in music.”

“And Lisbeth Salander was not, you say, a member of the band?”

“Like I said.”

“So why do our sources claim that Salander was in the band?”

“Because your sources are about as stupid as the newspapers.”

“Explain.”

“There were five of us girls in the band, and we still get together now and then. In the old days we used to meet once a week at Kvarnen. Now it’s about once a month. But we stay in touch.”

“And what do you do when you get together?”

“What do you think people do at Kvarnen?”

Faste sighed. “So you get together to drink.”

“We usually drink beer. And we gossip. What do you do when you get together with your friends?”

“And how does Salander come into the picture?”

“I met her at KomVux several years ago. She used to show up from time to time at Kvarnen and have a beer with us.”

“So Evil Fingers can’t be regarded as an organization?”

Norén looked at him as if he were from another planet.

“Are you dykes?”

“Would you like a punch in the mouth?”

“Answer the question.”

“It’s none of your business what we are.”

“Take it easy. You can’t provoke me.”

“Hello? The police are claiming that Lisbeth murdered three people and you come here to ask me about my sexual preferences. You can go to hell.”

“You know, I could take you in.”

“For what? By the way, I forgot to tell you that I’ve been studying law for three years and my father is Ulf Norén of Norén & Knape, the law firm. See you in court.”

“I thought you worked in the music business.”

“I do this because it’s fun. You think I make a living doing this?”

“I have no idea how you make a living.”

“I don’t make a living as a lesbian Satanist, if that’s what you think. And if that’s the basis of the police search for Lisbeth, then I can see why you haven’t found her.”

“Do you know where she is?”

Norén began rocking her upper body back and forth and let her hands glide up in front of her.

“I can feel that she’s close… Wait a minute, I’ll check my telepathic powers.”

“Cut it out.”

“I’ve already told you I haven’t heard from her for almost two years. I have no idea where she is. So now, if there isn’t anything else…”

Modig hooked up Svensson’s computer and spent the evening cataloguing the contents of his hard drive and the disks. She sat there until 11:00 reading his book.

She came to two realizations. First, that Svensson was a brilliant writer who described the business of the sex trade with compelling objectivity. She wished he could have lectured at the police academy – his knowledge would have been a valuable addition to the curriculum. Faste, for example, could have benefited from Svensson’s insights.

The second realization was that Blomkvist’s theory about Svensson’s research providing a motive for murder was completely valid. Svensson’s planned exposure of prostitutes’ clients would have done more than merely hurt a number of men. It was a brutal revelation. Some of the prominent players, several of whom had handed down verdicts in sex-crime trials or participated in the public debate, would be annihilated.

The problem was that even if a john who risked being exposed had decided to murder Svensson, there was, as yet, no prospect of such a link to Nils Bjurman. He did not feature in Svensson’s material, and that fact not only diminished the strength of Blomkvist’s argument but also reinforced the likelihood of Salander’s being the only possible suspect.

Even if a motive for the murders of Svensson and Johansson was still unclear, Salander had been at the crime scene and her fingerprints were on the murder weapon.

The weapon was also directly linked to the murder of Bjurman. There was a personal connection and a possible motive – the decoration on Bjurman’s abdomen raised the possibility of some form of sexual assault or a sadomasochistic relationship between the two. It was impossible to imagine Bjurman having voluntarily submitted to such a bizarre and painful tattoo. Either he had found pleasure in the humiliation or Salander – if she was the one who had done the tattooing – had first made him powerless. How it had actually happened was not something Modig wanted to speculate about.

On the other hand, Teleborian had confirmed that Salander’s violence was directed at people whom she regarded as a threat or who had offended her.

He had seemed genuinely protective, as if he did not want his former patient to come to any harm. All the same, the investigation had been based largely on his analysis of her – as a sociopath on the border of psychosis.

But Blomkvist’s theory was attractive.

She chewed her lower lip as she tried to visualize some alternative scenario to Salander the killer, working alone. Finally she wrote a line in her notebook.

Two completely separate motives? Two murderers? One murder weapon?

She had a fleeting thought that she could not quite pin down, but it was something she intended to ask Bublanski at the morning meeting. She could not explain why she suddenly felt so uncomfortable with the theory of Salander as a killer working alone.

Then she called it a night, resolutely shut down her computer, and locked the disks in her desk drawer. She put on her jacket, turned off the desk lamp, and was just about to lock the door to her office when she heard a sound further down the corridor. She frowned. She had thought she was alone in the department. She walked down the corridor to Faste’s office. His door was ajar and she heard him talking on the phone.

“It undeniably links things together,” she heard him say.

She stood undecided for a moment before she took a deep breath and knocked on the doorjamb. Faste looked up in surprise. She waved.

“Modig is still in the building,” Faste said into the phone. He listened and nodded without releasing her from his gaze. “OK, I’ll tell her.” He hung up. “Bubble,” he said in explanation. “What do you want?”

“What is it that links things together?” she asked.

He gave her a searching look. “Were you eavesdropping?”

“No, but your door was open and I heard you say that just as I knocked.”

Faste shrugged. “I called Bubble to tell him that the NFL have finally come up with something useful.”

“What’s that?”

“Svensson had a mobile with a Comviq cash card. They’ve produced a list of calls which confirms the conversation with Mikael Blomkvist at 7:30 p.m. That’s when Blomkvist was at dinner at his sister’s house.”

“Good. But I don’t think Blomkvist has anything to do with the murders.”

“Me neither. But Svensson made another call that night. At 9:34. The call lasted three minutes.”

“And?”

“He called Nils Bjurman’s home phone. In other words, there’s a link between the two murders.”

Modig sank down into Faste’s visitor’s chair.

“Sure. Have a seat, be my guest.”

She ignored him.

“OK. What does the time frame look like? At 7:30 Svensson calls Blomkvist and sets up a meeting for later that evening. At 9:30 Svensson calls Bjurman. Just before closing time at 10:00 Salander buys cigarettes at the corner shop in Enskede. Soon after 11:00 Blomkvist and his sister arrive in Enskede and at 11:11 he calls the police.”

“That seems to be correct, Miss Marple.”

“But it isn’t correct at all. According to the pathologist, Bjurman was shot between 10:00 and 11:00 that night. By which time Salander was in Enskede. We’ve been working on the assumption that Salander shot Bjurman first and then the couple in Enskede.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing. I talked with the pathologist again. We didn’t find Bjurman until the night after, almost twenty-four hours later. The pathologist says that the time of death could be plus or minus an hour.”

“But Bjurman must have been the first victim, since we found the murder weapon in Enskede. That would mean that she shot Bjurman sometime after 9:34 and then drove to Enskede, where she bought her cigarettes. Was there enough time to get from Odenplan to Enskede?”

“Yes, there was. She didn’t take public transportation as we assumed earlier. She had a car. Sonny Bohman and I test-drove the route and we had plenty of time.”

“But then she waits for an hour before she shoots Svensson and Johansson? What was she doing all that time?”

“She had coffee with them. We have her prints on the cup.”

He gave her a triumphant look. Modig sighed and sat silently for a minute.

“Hans, you’re looking at this like it’s some sort of prestige thing. You can be a fucking shithead and you drive people crazy sometimes, but I actually knocked on your door to ask you to forgive me for slapping you. I was out of line.”

He looked at her for a long moment. “Modig, you might think I’m a shithead. But I think you’re unprofessional and don’t have any business being a police officer. At least not at this level.”

Modig weighed various replies, but in the end she just shrugged and stood up.

“Well, now we know where we stand.”

“We know where we stand. And believe me, you’re not going to last long here.”

Modig closed the door behind her harder than she meant to. Don’t let that fucking asshole get to you. She went down to the garage.

Faste smiled contentedly at the closed door.

Blomkvist had just gotten home when his mobile rang.

“Hi. It’s Malin. Can you talk?”

“Sure.”

“Something struck me yesterday.”

“Tell me.”

“I was going through all the clippings we have here on the hunt for Salander, and I found that spread on her time at the psychiatric clinic. What I’m wondering is why there’s such a big gap in her biography.”

“What gap?”

“There’s plenty of stuff about the trouble she was mixed up in at school. Trouble with teachers and classmates and so on.”

“I remember that. There was even a teacher who said she was afraid of Lisbeth when she was eleven.”

“Birgitta Miåås.”

“That’s the one.”

“And there are details about Lisbeth at the psychiatric clinic. Plus a lot of stuff about her with foster families during her teens and about the assault in Gamla Stan.”

“So what are you thinking?”

“She was taken into the clinic just before her thirteenth birthday.”

“Yes?”

“And there isn’t a word about why she was committed. Obviously if a twelve-year-old is committed, something has to have happened. And in Lisbeth’s case it was most likely some huge outburst that should have shown up in her biography. But there’s nothing there.”

Blomkvist frowned. “Malin, I have it from a source I trust that there’s a police report on Lisbeth dated March 1991, when she was twelve. It’s not in the file. I was at the point of asking you to dig around for it.”

“If there’s a report then it would have to be a part of her file. It would be breaking the law not to have it there. Have you really checked?”

“No, but my source says that it’s not in the file.”

Eriksson paused for a second. “And how reliable is your source?”

“Very.”

Eriksson and Blomkvist had arrived at the same conclusion simultaneously.

“Säpo,” Eriksson said.

“Björck,” Blomkvist said.

CHAPTER 24

Per-Åke Sandström, a freelance journalist in his late forties, came home just after midnight. He was a little drunk and felt a lump of panic lurking in his stomach. He had spent the day doing nothing. He was, quite simply, terrified.

It was almost two weeks since Svensson had been killed. Sandström had watched the TV news that night in shock. He had felt a wave of relief and hope – Svensson was dead, so maybe the book about trafficking, in which Sandström would be exposed, was history.

He hated Svensson. He had begged and pleaded, he had crawled for that fucking pig.

It was not until the day after that that he began to consider his situation. The police would find Svensson’s text and start digging into his little escapade. Jesus… he could even be a murder suspect.

His panic had subsided when Salander’s face was slapped on every front page in the country. Who the hell was this Salander? He had never heard her name before. But the police clearly considered her a serious suspect, and according to the prosecutor’s statement, the murders might soon be solved. It was possible that no-one would show any interest in him at all. But from his own experience he knew that journalists always saved documentation and notes. Millennium. A piece-of-shit magazine with an undeserved reputation. They were like all the rest. Poking around and whining and damaging people.

He had no way of knowing how long the research had been going on. There was nobody he could ask. He felt as if he was in a vacuum.

He vacillated between panic and intoxication. Apparently the police were not looking for him. Maybe – if he was lucky – he would get away scot-free. But if he was not lucky, his working life would be over.

He stuck the key in his front door and turned the lock. When he opened the door he suddenly heard a rustling sound behind him and before he could turn he felt a paralyzing pain in the small of his back.

Björck had not yet gone to bed when the telephone rang. He was in his pajamas and dressing gown, but he was still sitting in the kitchen in the dark, gnawing on his dilemma. In his whole long career he had never found himself even close to being in such a fix.

He had not intended to pick up the phone. It was after midnight. But it kept ringing. After the tenth ring he could resist no longer.

“It’s Mikael Blomkvist,” said a voice on the other end.

Shit.

“I was in bed.”

“I thought you might be interested in hearing what I have to say.”

“What do you want?”

“Tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. I’m giving a press conference on the murders of Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson.”

Björck swallowed hard.

“I’m going to give an account of the details in the book about the sex trade that Svensson had all but finished. The only john I’ll be naming is you.”

“You promised to give me some time…” He heard the fear in his voice and stopped.

“It’s been several days. You said you’d call me after the weekend. Tomorrow is Tuesday. Either you tell me now or I’m holding that press conference in the morning.”

“If you hold that press conference you’ll never find out a damn thing about Zala.”

“That’s possible. But then it won’t be my problem any more either. You’ll have to do your talking to the police investigation instead. And to the rest of the media, of course.”

There was no room for negotiation.

Björck agreed to meet Blomkvist, but he succeeded in putting the meeting off until Wednesday. A short reprieve. But he was ready.

It was sink or swim.

He woke up on the floor of his living room. He did not know how long he had been unconscious. His body hurt all over and he couldn’t move. It took him a while to realize that his hands were tied behind his back with electrical tape and his feet were bound. He had a piece of tape over his mouth. The lamps in the room were lit and the blinds were closed. He couldn’t understand what had happened.

He was aware of sounds that seemed to be coming from his office. He lay still and listened and heard a drawer being opened and closed. A robbery? He heard the sound of paper and someone rummaging through the drawers.

It seemed like an eternity before he heard footsteps behind him. He tried turning his head, but he couldn’t see anyone. He told himself to stay calm.

Suddenly a loop of thick cotton rope was slipped over his head. A noose was tightened around his neck. The panic almost made him shit himself. He looked up and saw the rope run up to a block that was fastened to a hook where the ceiling lamp usually hung. Then the person who had assaulted him came into view. The first thing he saw was a pair of black boots.

The shock could not have been greater when he raised his eyes. He did not at first recognize the psychopath whose passport photograph had been plastered outside every Pressbyrå kiosk since Easter. She had short black hair and did not look that much like the picture in the papers. She was dressed all in black-jeans, midlength cotton jacket, T-shirt, gloves.

But what terrified him the most was her face. It was painted. She wore black lipstick, eyeliner, and dramatically prominent greenish-black eye shadow. The rest of her face was covered in white makeup. She had painted a red stripe from the left side of her forehead across her nose and down to the right side of her chin.

It was a grotesque mask. She looked out of her fucking mind.

His brain resisted. It seemed unreal.

Salander grasped the end of the rope and pulled. He felt the rope cut into his neck and for a few seconds he couldn’t breathe. Then he fought to get his feet under himself. With a block and tackle she hardly had to exert herself to pull him to his feet. When he was upright she stopped pulling and looped the rope a few times around a radiator pipe. She tied it with a clove hitch.

Then she vanished from his field of vision. She was gone for more than fifteen minutes. When she came back she pulled up a chair and sat in front of him. He tried to avoid looking at her painted face, but he could not help it. She laid a pistol on the living-room table. His pistol. She had found it in the shoebox in the wardrobe. A Colt 1911 Government. An illegal weapon he had had for several years. He had bought it from a friend but never even fired it. Right before his eyes she took out the magazine and filled it with rounds. She shoved it back in and cocked the weapon. Sandström was about to faint. He forced himself to meet her gaze.

“I don’t understand why men always have to document their perversions,” she said.

She had a soft but ice-cold voice. She held up a photograph. She must have printed it from his hard drive, for God’s sake.

“I assume that this is Ines Hammujärvi, Estonian, seventeen years old, from Riepalu near Narva. Did you have fun with her?”

The question was rhetorical. Sandström had no way of answering. His mouth was taped shut and his brain was incapable of formulating a response. The photograph showed… Good God, why did I save those pictures?

“You know who I am? Nod.”

Sandström nodded.

“You’re a sadistic pig, a pervert, and a rapist.”

He made no move.

“Nod.”

He nodded. Suddenly he had tears in his eyes.

“Let’s get the rules of engagement 100 percent clear,” Salander said. “As far as I’m concerned, you should be put to death at once. Whether you survive the night or not makes no difference to me at all. Understand?”

He nodded.

“It has probably not escaped your attention that I’m a madwoman who likes killing people. Especially men.”

She pointed at the recent newspapers that he had collected on the living-room table.

“I’m going to remove the tape from your mouth. If you scream or raise your voice I will zap you with this.” She held up a Taser. “This horrific device puts out 50,000 volts. About 40,000 volts next time, since I’ve used it once and haven’t recharged it. Understand?”

He looked doubtful.

“That means that your muscles will stop functioning. That was what you experienced at the door when you came staggering home.” She smiled at him. “And it means that your legs will not hold you up and you’ll end up hanging yourself. After I’ve zapped you, all I have to do is get up and leave the apartment.”

He nodded. Good God, she’s a fucking crazy killer. He could not help it: the tears flowed uncontrollably down his cheeks. He sniffled.

She got up and pulled off the tape. Her grotesque face was only an inch from his.

“Don’t say a word,” she said. “If you talk without permission, I’ll zap you.”

She waited until he stopped snuffling and met her eyes.

“You have one chance to survive the night,” she said. “One chance – not two. I’m going to ask you a number of questions. If you answer them, I’ll let you live. Nod if you understand.”

He nodded.

“If you refuse to answer a question I’ll have to zap you. Understand?”

He nodded.

“If you lie to me or give an evasive answer I’ll zap you.”

He nodded.

“I’m not going to bargain with you. There will be no second chance. You answer my questions immediately or you die. If you answer satisfactorily, then you’ll survive. It’s that simple.”

He nodded. He believed her. He had no choice.

“Please,” he said. “I don’t want to die…”

“It’s up to you whether you live or die. But you just broke my first rule: you do not talk without my permission.”

He pressed his lips together. God, she’s completely insane.

Blomkvist was too frustrated and restless to know what to do. Finally he put on his jacket and scarf and walked aimlessly to Södra station, past Bofills Båge, before he ended up at the Millennium offices on Götgatan. It was perfectly quiet. He did not turn on any lights, but he did put on the coffeemaker and then stood at the window looking down at Götgatan. He tried to put his thoughts in order. The murder investigation was like a broken mosaic in which he could make out some pieces while others were simply missing. Somewhere there was a pattern. He could sense it, but he could not figure it out. Too many pieces were missing.

He was assailed by doubt. She is not a deranged killer, he reminded himself. She had written to tell him that she had not shot his friends. He believed her. But in some unfathomable way she was still intimately involved in the murders.

Slowly he began to reevaluate the theory he had clung to since he walked into the apartment in Enskede. He had immediately assumed that Svensson’s investigative reporting about sex trafficking was the only plausible motive for the murders. Now he was coming to accept Bublanski’s assertion that this couldn’t explain Bjurman’s murder.

Salander had told him in her message that he should forget about the johns and focus on Zala instead. Why? The damn pest. Why couldn’t she tell him anything that made sense?

Blomkvist poured coffee into a Young Left mug. He sat on one of the sofas in the middle of the office, put his feet up on the coffee table, and lit a forbidden cigarette.

Björck was on the list of johns. Bjurman had been Salander’s guardian. It could not be an accident that Bjurman and Björck had both worked at Säpo. A police report about Salander had disappeared.

Could there be more than one motive?

Could Lisbeth Salander be the motive?

Blomkvist sat there with an idea that he couldn’t put into words. There was something still unexplored, but he couldn’t explain exactly what he meant by the idea that Salander herself could be a motive for murder. He experienced a fleeting sense of discovery.

Then he realized that he was too tired and poured out his coffee, rinsed the machine, and went home to bed. Lying in the dark, he took up the thread again and for two hours tried to understand what it was he wanted to articulate.

Salander smoked a cigarette, comfortably leaning back in the chair in front of him. She crossed her right leg over her left and fixed him with her gaze. Sandström had never seen such an intense look before. When she spoke her voice was still soft.

“In January 2003 you visited Ines Hammujärvi for the first time at her apartment in Norsborg. She had just turned sixteen. Why did you visit her?”

Sandström did not know how to answer. He could hardly make sense of it himself, how it had begun or why he… She raised the Taser.

“I… I don’t know. I wanted her. She was so beautiful.”

“Beautiful?”

“Yes. She was beautiful.”

“And you thought that you had the right to tie her to the bed and fuck her.”

“She went along with it. I swear. She went along with it.”

“You paid her?”

Sandström bit his tongue. “No.”

“Why not? She was a whore. Whores get paid.”

“She was a… she was a present.”

“A present?” Her voice had taken on a dangerous tone.

“It was in return for a favour I did someone.”

“Per-Åke,” Salander said in a reasonable tone, “you wouldn’t be trying to avoid answering my question, would you?”

“I swear. I’ll answer anything you ask. I won’t lie.”

“Good. What favour and who was it for?”

“I’d smuggled in some anabolic steroids. I was on a business trip to Estonia and I brought the pills back in my car. The guy I went with was called Harry Ranta. Although he didn’t come with me in the car.”

“How did you meet Harry Ranta?”

“I’ve known him for years. Since the eighties, in fact. He’s a friend. We used to go to bars together.”

“And it was Harry Ranta who offered you Ines Hammujärvi as… a present?”

“Yes… no, I’m sorry, that was later, here in Stockholm. It was his brother, Atho Ranta.”

“So you’re saying that Atho Ranta knocked on your door and asked if you wanted to drive to Norsborg and fuck Ines?”

“No… I was at… we had a party in… damn, I can’t remember where we were…”

He was suddenly shaking uncontrollably and felt his knees begin to give way. He needed to brace his legs against something to stand upright.

“Answer calmly,” Salander said. “I’m not going to hang you because you need time to collect your thoughts. But the minute I get the idea you’re trying to dodge a question, then … pow!”

She raised her eyebrows and to his astonishment looked angelic. As angelic as anyone could look behind such a hideous mask.

Sandström swallowed. His mouth was dry as a bone, and he could feel the rope tightening around his neck.

“Where you went drinking isn’t important. How come Atho Ranta offered you Ines?”

“We were talking about… we… I told him that I wanted…” He realized he was crying.

“You said that you wanted to have one of his whores.”

He nodded. “I was drunk. He said that she needed… needed…”

“What was it she needed?”

“Atho said that she needed punishment. She was difficult. She didn’t do what he wanted.”

“And what did he want her to do?”

“Whore for him. He offered me… I was drunk and didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t mean… Forgive me.”

He snuffled.

“It’s not me you need to ask for forgiveness. So you offered to help Atho punish Ines and the two of you drove over to her place.”

“That’s not how it was.”

“Tell me how it was. Why did you go with Atho to her place?”

She balanced the Taser on her knee. He was shaking again.

“I went because I wanted to have her. She was there and she was available. Ines lived with a girlfriend of Harry Ranta’s. I don’t think I ever knew her name. Atho tied Ines to the bed and I… I had sex with her. Atho watched.”

“No… you didn’t have sex with her. You raped her.”

He said nothing.

“Or what?”

He nodded.

“What did Ines say?”

“She didn’t say anything.”

“Did she protest?”

He shook his head.

“So she thought it was cool that a middle-aged dickwad tied her up and fucked her.”

“She was drunk. She didn’t care.”

Salander sighed in resignation.

“OK. And then you kept on going to visit Ines.”

“She was so… She wanted me.”

“Bullshit.”

He looked at Salander in despair. Then he nodded.

“I… I raped her. Harry and Atho had given permission. They wanted her to be… to be trained.”

“Did you pay them?”

He nodded.

“How much?”

“It was a friendly deal. I helped out with the smuggling.”

“How much?”

“A few grand altogether.”

“In one of your pictures Ines is here in the apartment.”

“Harry brought her here.”

He snuffled again.

“So for a few thousand you got a girl you could do with as you pleased. How many times did you rape her?”

“I don’t know… several times.”

“OK. Who runs this gang?”

“They’re going to kill me if I rat on them.”

“I don’t give a shit. Right now I’m a much bigger problem for you than the Ranta brothers.” She held up the Taser.

“Atho. He’s the older one. Harry is the fixer.”

“How many more are there in the gang?”

“I only know Harry and Atho. Atho’s girl is in it too. And a guy called… I don’t know. Pelle something. He’s Swedish. I don’t know who he is. He’s a junkie who runs errands for them.”

“Atho’s girl?”

“Silvia. She’s a whore.”

Salander sat for a moment, thinking. Then she raised her eyes.

“Who is Zala?”

Sandström turned pale. The same question that Svensson had hounded him about. He said nothing for so long that he noticed the girl was getting pissed off.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know who he is.”

Salander’s expression darkened.

“You’ve been doing fine up to now. Don’t throw away your only chance,” she said.

“I swear to God, honest. I don’t know who he is. The journalist you shot…”

He stopped. It might not be a good idea to bring up her massacre in Enskede.

“Yes?”

“He asked me the same thing. I don’t know. If I knew I’d tell you. I swear. He’s somebody Atho knows.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“Just for a minute once on the phone. I talked to someone who said his name was Zala. Or rather, he talked to me.”

“Why?”

Sandström blinked. Drops of sweat were running into his eyes and he could feel snot running down his chin.

“I… they wanted me to do them another favour.”

“The story is getting annoyingly slow,” Salander said.

“They wanted me to take another trip to Tallinn and bring back a car that was prepared already. Amphetamines. I didn’t want to do it.”

“Why not?”

“It was too much. They were such gangsters. I wanted out. I had a job to get on with.”

“So you think you were just a gangster in your free time.”

“I’m not really like that.”

“Oh, right.” Her voice contained such contempt that Sandström closed his eyes.

“Keep going. How did Zala come into the picture?”

“It was a nightmare.”

The tears were running again. He bit his lip so hard that it began to bleed.

“Boring,” Salander said.

“Atho kept after me about it. Harry warned me and said that Atho was getting angry and that he didn’t know how it would pan out. Finally I agreed to meet Atho. That was in August of last year. I drove to Norsborg with Harry…”

His mouth kept moving but the words disappeared. Salander’s eyes narrowed. He found his voice again.

“Atho was a nutcase. He’s very brutal. You have no idea how brutal he can be. He said that it was too late for me to pull out and that if I didn’t do as he said I wouldn’t be allowed to live. He was going to give me a demonstration.”

“Oh yeah?”

“They forced me to go with them. We drove towards Södertälje. Atho told me to put on a hood. It was a bag that he tied over my eyes. I was scared to death.”

“So you were in a car with a bag over your head. Then what happened?”

“The car stopped. I didn’t know where I was.”

“Where did they put the bag on you?”

“Just before Södertälje.”

“And how long did it take you to get there?”

“Maybe… half an hour. They got me out of the car. It was some sort of warehouse.”

“What happened?”

“Harry and Atho led me inside. There were lights on. The first thing I saw was some poor guy lying on a cement floor. He was tied up. He’d been beaten really badly.”

“Who was it?”

“His name was Kenneth Gustafsson. But I didn’t find that out until later.”

“What happened?”

“There was a man there. He was the biggest man I’ve ever seen. Enormous. Nothing but muscle.”

“What did he look like?”

“He looked like the Devil himself. Blond.”

“Name?”

“He never said his name.”

“OK. A big blond guy. Who else?”

“There was another man. He looked stressed. Hair in a ponytail.”

Magge Lundin.

“More?”

“Plus me and Harry and Atho.”

“Keep going.”

“The huge guy… he set out a chair for me. He didn’t say a word. It was Atho who did the talking. He said that the guy on the floor was a snitch. He wanted me to know what happened to people who made trouble.” Sandström was blubbering unrestrainedly.

“The big guy lifted the other guy off the floor and put him on another chair facing me. We were sitting a yard or so apart. I looked him in the eyes. Then the giant stood behind him and put his hands around his neck… He… he…”

“Strangled him?”

“Yeah… no… he squeezed him to death. I think he broke his neck with his bare hands. I heard the guy’s neck snap and he died right in front of me.”

Sandström was swaying on the rope. Tears were streaming down his face. He had never told anyone this before. Salander gave him a minute to collect himself.

“And then?”

“The other man – the one with the ponytail – started up a chain saw and sawed off the guy’s head and then his hands. After that the giant came up to me. He put his hands around my neck. I tried to pull his hands away. I pulled as hard as I could, but I couldn’t budge him an inch. But he didn’t squeeze – he just held his hands there for a long time.

Meanwhile Atho took out his mobile and made a call in Russian. Then he said that Zala wanted to talk to me and held the phone to my ear.”

“What did Zala say?”

“He just asked whether I still wanted to pull out. I promised to go to Tallinn and get the car with the amphetamines. What else could I do?”

Salander sat without speaking for a long time. She contemplated the snuffling journalist on the rope and seemed to be thinking about something.

“Describe his voice.”

“It… sounded normal.”

“Deep voice, high voice?”

“Deep. Ordinary. Gruff.”

“What language did he speak?”

“Swedish.”

“Accent?”

“Yeah, maybe a little. But good Swedish. He and Atho spoke Russian.”

“Do you understand Russian?”

“A little. Not fluent. Just a little.”

“What did Atho say to him?”

“He just said that the demonstration was over.”

“Have you told anyone else about this?”

“No.”

“Svensson?”

“No… no.”

“Svensson visited you.”

Sandström nodded.

“I can’t hear you.”

“Yes.”

“How come?”

“He knew that I had… the whores.”

“What did he ask?”

“He wanted to know… about Zala. He asked about Zala. That was the second visit.”

“The second visit?”

“He got in touch two weeks before he died. That was the first visit. Then he came back two days before you… he…”

“Before I shot him?”

“Yes.”

“And he asked about Zala then?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. I couldn’t tell him anything. I admitted that I’d spoken to him on the phone. That was all. I didn’t say anything about the blond monster or what they did to Gustafsson.”

“OK. Tell me exactly what Svensson asked.”

“I… he just wanted to know what I knew about Zala. That was all.”

“And you didn’t tell him anything?”

“Nothing of any use. I don’t know anything.”

She bit her lower lip pensively. There was something he wasn’t saying.

“Who did you tell about Svensson’s visit?”

Sandström seemed to shiver.

Salander waved the Taser.

“I called Harry.”

“When?”

He swallowed. “The night Svensson visited me the first time.”

She kept on for another half hour, but he was just repeating himself, adding details here and there. She stood up and put a hand on the rope.

“You must be one of the sorriest perverts I’ve ever met,” Salander said. “What you did to Ines deserves the death penalty. But I told you that you would live if you answered my questions. I keep my promises.”

She loosened the knot. Sandström collapsed in a slobbering heap on the floor. He saw her put a stool on his coffee table and climb up and unhook the block and tackle. She coiled the rope and stuffed it in a backpack. She went into the bathroom. He heard the water running. When she came back she had washed off the makeup.

Her face looked scrubbed and naked.

“You can cut yourself free.”

She dropped a kitchen knife beside him.

He heard her out in the hall for a long time. It sounded as though she was changing clothes. Then he heard the front door open and close. It took him half an hour to cut off the tape. He first sank down on the sofa, then staggered to his feet and searched the apartment. She had taken his Colt 1911 Government.

Salander arrived home at 4:55 a.m. She took off the Irene Nesser wig and went straight to bed without turning on her computer to see whether Blomkvist had solved the mystery of the missing police report.

She was awake at 9:00 and spent all of Tuesday digging up information about the Ranta brothers.

Atho Ranta had an extensive record in the police criminal files. He was a Finnish citizen from an Estonian family. He came to Sweden in 1971. From 1972 to 1978 he worked as a carpenter for Skånska Concrete Pouring. He was dismissed after being caught stealing from a building site and sentenced to seven months in prison. Between 1980 and 1982 he worked for a smaller builder. He was kicked out after turning up drunk at work several times. For the remainder of the eighties he made a living as a bouncer, a technician at a company that serviced oil-fired boilers, a dishwasher, and a janitor at a school. He was fired from all these jobs for drunkenness or for getting into fights. His janitorial job lasted only a few months: a teacher reported him for sexual harassment and threatening behaviour.

In 1987 he was fined and sentenced to a month in prison for car theft, driving without insurance, and receiving stolen property. The following year he was fined for possession of an illegal weapon. In 1990 he was convicted of a sexual offence that wasn’t specified in his criminal record. In 1991 he was charged with intimidation but acquitted. The same year he was fined and put on probation for smuggling alcohol. He served three months in 1992 for beating up his girlfriend and making threats against her sister. He managed to stay out of trouble until 1997, when he was convicted of handling stolen goods and aggravated assault. This time he got ten months in prison.

Harry, his younger brother, followed him to Sweden in 1982 and worked in a warehouse for a long time. His criminal record showed three convictions: in 1990 for insurance fraud, in 1992 with a sentence of two years – for aggravated assault, receiving stolen property, theft, and rape. He was deported to Finland but in 1996 returned to Sweden, when he was once more sentenced to ten months in prison for aggravated assault and rape. The verdict was appealed and the appeals court acquitted him on the rape charge. But the conviction for assault was upheld, and he served six months. In 2000 he was charged again, this time for intimidation and rape. The charges were later dropped and the case dismissed.

Salander traced their last-known addresses: Atho’s was in Norsborg, Harry’s in Alby.

Paolo Roberto got Miriam Wu’s answering machine for the fifteenth time. He’d been to the address on Lundagatan several times already that day. No-one answered when he rang her doorbell.

It was past 8:00 on Tuesday evening. She had to come home sometime, damn it. He understood that Wu would want to stay out of sight, but the worst of the media blitz had subsided. He might as well sit outside the door of her building in case she turned up, even if it was only for a change of clothing. He filled a thermos with coffee and made himself some sandwiches. Before he left his apartment he made the sign of the cross in front of the crucifix and the Madonna.

He parked about a hundred feet from the entrance on Lundagatan and pushed back the seat to make more room for his legs. He played the radio at a low volume. He taped up a photograph of Wu that he’d cut out of a newspaper. She looked great, he thought. He patiently watched the few people walking past. Miriam Wu was not one of them.

Every ten minutes he dialled her number. He gave up trying to call at around 9:00 when his mobile told him that the battery was almost dead.

Sandström spent Tuesday in a state approaching apathy. He had slept the night on the sofa in the living room, incapable of going to bed and unable to stop the sobbing fits that regularly overcame him. On Tuesday morning he went down to Systembolaget in Solna and bought a bottle of Skåne Aquavit. Then he went back to his sofa and drank half of it.

Not until later did he come to a clear understanding of his situation and begin to consider what he could do about it. He wished that he had never heard of the Ranta brothers and their whores. He could not believe that he had been so stupid as to let himself be enticed to the apartment in Norsborg where Atho had tied the heavily drugged Ines Hammujärvi to a bed with her legs spread, then challenged him about who had the bigger rod. They had taken turns, and he had won the contest for the greater number of sexual feats performed that night.

The girl woke up once and tried to resist. Atho spent half an hour alternating between slapping her and filling her with drink, after which she was pacified and he invited Sandström to continue the sport.

Fucking whore.

How could he have been so stupid?

He could hardly expect any mercy from Millennium. They made their living with that type of scandal.

He was scared to death of the madwoman Salander.

Not to mention that blond monster.

Obviously he couldn’t go to the police.

He wasn’t going to be able to manage on his own, and the problem wasn’t going to go away by itself.

There was only one slim possibility open to him, one place where he could expect an ounce of sympathy and maybe a solution of sorts. He was clutching at straws, but it was his only option.

That afternoon he gathered his courage and called Harry Ranta’s mobile. There was no answer. He kept trying until 10:00 that night. After thinking about the matter for a long time (and fortifying himself with the rest of the aquavit) he called Atho Ranta. It was Atho’s girlfriend Silvia who answered. She told him that the Ranta brothers were on vacation in Tallinn. No, she did not know how to reach them. No, she had no idea when they would be back. They would be in Estonia for quite a while. She sounded glad of that.

Sandström wasn’t sure if he was depressed or relieved. It meant that he didn’t have to explain things to Atho. But the underlying message, that the Ranta brothers had decided to take a breather in Tallinn for the foreseeable future, did not do much to calm Sandström’s nerves.

CHAPTER 25

Paolo Roberto had not gone to sleep, but he was so deeply immersed in his thoughts that it was a moment before he noticed the woman walking down from Högalid Church after 11:00 p.m. He saw her in his rearview mirror. Not until she passed under a streetlight about seventy yards behind him did he snap his head around and at once recognize that it was Miriam Wu.

He sat up in his seat. His immediate thought was to get out of the car, but he might scare her off. It was better to wait until she reached the front door.

As he watched her approach, he saw a dark-coloured van pull up next to her. Paolo Roberto looked on, horrified, as a man – a devilishly huge beast – hopped out from the sliding doors and grabbed Wu. She was taken completely by surprise. She tried to wriggle away by backing up, but the man held her wrists in a viselike grip.

Paolo Roberto’s mouth dropped open when he saw Wu’s leg come up in a fast arc. She’s a kickboxer! She landed a blow on the man’s head but it didn’t seem to faze him in the least. Instead the man raised his hand and slapped Wu on the side of her head. Paolo Roberto heard the blow from where he was sitting. Wu hit the deck as if struck by lightning. The man bent down, picked her up with one hand, and simply tossed her into the van. That was when Paolo Roberto closed his mouth and came to life. He threw open the car door and sprinted towards the van.

After only a few steps he realized how fruitless it was. The van that Miriam Wu had been thrown into like a sack of potatoes had made a U-turn and was already moving down the street before he reached full speed. It was headed towards Högalid Church. Paolo Roberto spun around and raced back to his car. He too made a U-turn. The van had vanished when he came to the corner. He braked, looked down Högalidsgatan, and then took a chance and turned left towards Hornsgatan.

When he reached Hornsgatan he came up against a red light, but there was no traffic, so he eased into the intersection and looked around. The only taillights he could see were turning left up towards Liljeholmsbron at Långholmsgatan. He could not see if it was the van, but it was the only vehicle in sight. He accelerated in pursuit but was stopped by the lights at Långholmsgatan and had to let the traffic from Kungsholmen pass as the seconds ticked away. When the traffic cleared, he accelerated hard, ignoring another red light.

He drove as fast as he dared across Liljeholmsbron and faster as he passed through Liljeholmen. He still didn’t know if it was the van whose taillights he had seen, and he didn’t know whether it had turned off to Gröndal or Årsta. He decided to go straight and floored it again. He was doing more than ninety miles an hour and blew past the sluggish, law-abiding traffic, assuming some driver or other would take down his licence plate number.

When he reached Bredäng he spotted the vehicle again. He closed in until he was only fifty yards behind and was sure it was the van. He slowed to about fifty miles an hour and fell back to two hundred yards. Only then did he start breathing normally.

Miriam Wu felt the blood running down her neck as she landed on the floor of the van. Her nose was bleeding. He had split her lower lip and probably broken her nose. The attack had come like a bolt out of the blue. Her resistance had been quashed in less than a second. She felt the van start up as soon as her attacker slid the doors shut. For a moment, as the driver turned the van, the blond giant lost his balance.

She twisted around and braced her hips against the floor. When the man turned towards her she lashed out with a kick, striking him on the side of his head. She even saw that her heel left a mark. It was a kick that should have hurt.

He looked at her in surprise. Then he smiled.

Jesus, what kind of a fucking monster is this?

She kicked again, but he caught her leg and twisted her foot so hard that she shrieked in pain and had to roll over onto her stomach.

Then he leaned over her and slapped her again. He hit the side of her head. Wu saw stars. It felt like being struck by a sledgehammer. He sat on her back. She tried to lift him, but she could not move him an inch. He twisted her arms behind her back and locked them in handcuffs. She was helpless. Suddenly she felt a paralyzing fear.

Blomkvist was passing the Globe Arena on his way home from Tyresö. He had spent the afternoon and evening visiting three people on Svensson’s list. Not a thing had come of it. He had encountered panic-stricken men who had already been confronted by Svensson and were just waiting for the sky to fall. They had begged and pleaded with him. He crossed all of them off his private list of murder suspects.

He took out his mobile as he drove across Skanstullsbron and called Berger. She didn’t answer. He tried Eriksson. No answer there either. Damn. It was late. He wanted to talk about this with somebody.

He wondered whether Paolo Roberto had had any success with Miriam Wu and dialled his number. It rang five times before he got an answer.

“Paolo.”

“Hi. It’s Blomkvist. I’m wondering how it went –”

“Blomkvist, I’m on skrrritch skrrritch a van with Miriam.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Skrp skrrrraaap skrraaaap.”

“You’re breaking up. I can’t hear you.”

Then the connection broke off.

Paolo Roberto swore. His battery died just as he went through Fittja. He pushed the ON button and brought the phone back to life. He dialled the number for emergency services, but as soon as they answered his mobile went dead again.

Shit.

He had a battery charger that worked in the cigarette lighter. But the charger was in the hall at home. He tossed the mobile onto the passenger seat and concentrated on keeping the taillights of the van in sight. He was driving a BMW with a full tank, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that the van would be able to outrun him. But he didn’t want to attract attention, so he increased the distance to several hundred yards.

A giant on steroids beats up a girl right in front of me. Just wait till I get my hands on that fucker.

If Erika Berger had been there she would have called him a macho cowboy. Paolo Roberto called it being pissed off.

Blomkvist drove down Lundagatan. Miriam Wu’s apartment was in darkness. He tried calling Paolo Roberto again, but got the message that the subscriber could not be reached. He swore to himself and then drove home and made coffee and a sandwich.

The drive took longer than Paolo Roberto had anticipated. The van went as far as Södertälje before it headed west on the E20 towards Strängnäs. Just past Nykvarn, it turned off to the left onto smaller roads through the countryside of Sörmland.

The smaller the roads, the greater the risk that he would be noticed by the men in the van. He eased off the accelerator and fell back even more.

He was unsure of his geography out here, but as far as he could tell they were passing to the west of Lake Yngern. He lost the van from view and went faster. He came out on a long straightaway.

The van had disappeared. There were small roads on both sides. He had lost them.

Miriam Wu felt pain in her neck and face, but she had overcome her panic at being helpless. He had not hit her again. She had managed to sit up and was leaning against the back of the driver’s seat. Her hands were cuffed behind her back and there was a strip of duct tape over her mouth. One nostril was clogged with blood and she was having difficulty breathing.

She looked at her assailant. Since he had taped her mouth he hadn’t said a word. She looked at the mark where she had kicked him. It was a blow that should have caused serious damage. He seemed hardly to have noticed it.

He was massively built, and on a huge scale. He had muscles that spoke of long hours spent in a gym. But he was not a bodybuilder. His muscles looked completely natural. His hands were as big as frying pans.

The van was bumping along a road full of potholes. She thought they had taken the E4 south for a long time before they turned off onto country roads.

She knew that even if her hands were free she wouldn’t stand a chance against this giant.

Eriksson called Blomkvist a little before midnight.

“I’m sorry for calling so late. I’ve been trying to reach you for hours, but you didn’t answer your mobile.”

“I had it turned off all day while I was dealing with some of the johns.”

“I came up with something that could be of interest,” Eriksson said.

“Tell me.”

“Bjurman. You asked me to look into his background.”

“What did you find?”

“He was born in 1950, and began studying law in 1970. He took his law degree in 1976, started working at Klang and Reine in 1978, and opened his own practice in 1989. One of his side jobs was as a clerk at a district court for a few weeks in 1976. Right after he got his degree in 1976 he worked for two years, from 1976 to 1978, as a lawyer at National Police headquarters.”

“Interesting.”

“I checked out what sort of work he did there. It wasn’t easy to dig up. But he was, for one thing, in charge of legal matters for the Security Police. He worked on immigration.”

“Which tells us?”

“That he worked there with your man Björck.”

“That bastard. He didn’t say a word about having actually worked with Bjurman.”

The van had to be somewhere in the vicinity.

Paolo Roberto had glimpsed it only a minute before he lost it. He reversed onto the grass verge and turned back. He drove slowly, looking for side roads.

After only a hundred and fifty yards he spotted a light glinting through a narrow gap in the curtain of trees. He saw a forest track on the opposite side of the road and drove up it about fifty feet, turned, and parked facing out, not bothering to lock the car. Then he jogged back across the road and hopped over a ditch. He wished he had a flashlight as he wound his way forward through the undergrowth and low branches.

Very soon he came out onto a sandy gravel area and could see some low, dark buildings. As he walked towards them the light above a loading bay came on.

He dropped to his knees and stayed motionless. A second later the lights went on inside the building. It appeared to be a warehouse about a hundred feet long with a row of narrow windows high on one side. The yard was full of containers, and to his right was parked a yellow front-end loader. Next to it was a white Volvo. In the glow of the outdoor light he suddenly saw the van, parked only twenty-five yards from where he crouched.

Then a door opened in the loading bay right in front of him. A man with mousy hair and a beer belly came out of the warehouse and lit a cigarette. Paolo Roberto saw, against the light from the door, that he had a ponytail.

He kept stock-still. He was in full view less than twenty yards from the man, but the flame from his cigarette lighter had knocked out his night vision. Then he and the man with the ponytail both heard a half-choked howl from the van. As Ponytail moved towards the van, Paolo Roberto eased himself down flat on the ground.

He heard a rattle as the sliding doors of the van opened and saw the huge blond man get out, reach back inside, and haul out Miriam Wu. He took her under one arm and held her in an easy grip as she struggled. The two men exchanged some words, but Paolo Roberto could not hear what they said. Then Ponytail opened the door on the driver’s side and hopped in. He started up the van and made a tight turn in the yard. The beams of the headlights swung past only a few yards from Paolo Roberto. The van disappeared down an access road and the noise of its engine faded into the distance.

The giant carried Miriam Wu through the door in the loading bay. Paolo Roberto could see a shadow through the windows high on the wall. It seemed as if the shadow was moving towards the far end of the building.

He got up cautiously. His clothes felt sticky. He was relieved and uneasy. He was relieved because he had managed to track the van and had Miriam Wu within reach. But he was in awe of the giant who had plucked her out of the van as if she were a bag of groceries.

The sane thing to do would be to retreat and call the police. But his battery was dead, and he had only a vague idea of where he was. He certainly couldn’t give directions to anyone else as to how to get there. And he had no clue what was happening to the girl inside the building.

He made a slow circuit and discovered that there was only one entrance. After two minutes he was back near the door and had to make a decision. No question that the giant was a bad guy. He had kidnapped Miriam Wu. Paolo Roberto did not feel particularly afraid – he had great self-confidence and knew that he could give as good as he got if it came to a fight. The question was whether the man inside the warehouse was armed and whether there were other people with him. He hesitated. There shouldn’t be any others besides the girl and the blond giant.

The loading bay was wide enough for a front-end loader to drive through it, and there was a normal-sized door fitted into the gate. Paolo Roberto walked over and pressed down the handle to open it. He entered a big warehouse bathed in light, filled with assorted building materials, crushed boxes, and trash.

Miriam Wu felt tears running down her cheeks. She was crying not so much from pain as from helplessness. During the journey the giant had handled her as if she weighed nothing at all. He ripped the tape off her mouth when the van stopped. He lifted her and carried her inside without the least effort and dumped her on the cement floor, paying no heed to her protests. When he looked at her his eyes were ice cold.

Miriam Wu knew that she was going to die in this warehouse.

He turned his back on her and walked to a table, where he opened a bottle of mineral water, drinking from it in long gulps. He had not taped her legs together, and she attempted to stand up.

He turned to her and smiled. He was closer to the door than she was. She would have no chance of making it past him. Resigned, she sank to her knees, furious at herself. I’ll be damned if I give up without a fight. She got up again and clenched her teeth. Come on, you fucking tub of lard.

She felt clumsy and off balance with her hands cuffed behind her, but when he came towards her she backed, circling away, watching for an opening. She lashed out with a lightning kick to his ribs, wheeled around and kicked again at his crotch. She hit his hip, backed off a few feet, and switched legs for the next kick. With her hands manacled she did not have the balance to kick at his face, but she delivered a swift kick to his breastbone.

He reached out a hand and grabbed her by the shoulder, spun her around and gave her a single blow with his fist, not very hard, to the kidneys. Miriam Wu shrieked like a madwoman as a paralyzing pain sliced through her midsection. She sank to her knees again. He gave her one more slap to the side of her head, and she tumbled to the floor. Then he kicked her in the torso. She gasped for breath as she heard a rib crack.

Paolo Roberto saw nothing of the beating, but he did hear Miriam Wu wail in pain, a sharp, shrill scream that was immediately cut off. He looked in the direction of the sound and clenched his teeth. There was a room beyond a dividing wall. He moved silently through the warehouse and peered through the doorway just as the man rolled the girl onto her back. The giant vanished from his field of view for a few seconds and came back with a chain saw, which he set on the floor in front of her. Paolo Roberto slipped off his jacket.

“I want the answer to a simple question.”

He had a high-pitched voice, almost as if it had never broken, and an accent.

“Where is Lisbeth Salander?”

“I don’t know,” Miriam Wu said, obviously in pain.

“That’s the wrong answer. You’ll have one more chance before I start this thing.”

He squatted down and patted the chain saw.

“Where is Lisbeth Salander hiding?”

Wu shook her head.

When the man reached for the chain saw, Paolo Roberto took three determined strides into the room and threw a hard right hook at his kidneys.

Paolo Roberto had not become a world-famous boxer by being tentative in the ring. He had fought thirty-three bouts in his professional career and won twenty-eight of them. When he punched someone as hard as he could he expected to see his opponent feel pain. But this time he felt as if he had smashed his hand into a concrete wall. He had never experienced anything like it in all the years he’d spent as a boxer. He looked in astonishment at the colossus in front of him.

The man turned and looked with equal astonishment at the boxer.

“What do you say we find you somebody in your own weight class?” said Paolo Roberto.

He got off a string of right-left-right punches to the body and put some muscle behind them. They were heavy blows. The only effect was that the giant took half a step back, more from surprise than from the effect of the punches. Then he smiled.

“You’re Paolo Roberto,” he said.

Paolo Roberto stopped, amazed. He had just landed four punches that should have put the giant on the deck while the referee counted to ten. But his blows seemed not to have had the slightest effect.

Good God. This isn’t normal.

Then he saw as if in slow motion the man’s right hook come flying towards him. He was slow and telegraphed the punch in advance. Paolo Roberto had time to move, but the blow glanced off his shoulder. It felt as if he had been hit by a steel bar.

Paolo Roberto backed up two steps, filled with new respect for his opponent.

There’s something wrong with him. Nobody can hit this hard.

He automatically blocked a left hook with his forearm and felt at once a sharp pain. He did not manage to block the right hook that came out of nowhere and landed on his forehead.

Paolo Roberto tumbled backwards out the door. He landed against a mound of wooden pallets and shook his head. He felt blood streaming down his face. He cut my eyebrow. It’ll have to be sewn up. Again.

In the next moment the giant came into view and Paolo Roberto instinctively twisted to the side. He escaped by a hairsbreadth another clublike blow from those enormous fists. He quickly backed up, three, four shuffles, and got his arms up in a defensive position. He was shaken.

The man regarded him with eyes that were curious and almost amused. Then he assumed the same defensive position. This guy is a boxer. They began to circle each other slowly.

The hundred and eighty seconds that followed became the most bizarre match that Paolo Roberto had ever fought. There were no coaches, no referee. There was no bell to call a halt to the round and send the fighters to their corners. No pause for water and smelling salts and a towel to wipe the blood from his eyes.

Paolo Roberto knew now that he was fighting for his life. All his training, all the years of hammering on punching bags, all the sparring, and all the experience from all the bouts he had fought came together as the adrenaline pumped in a way he had never before experienced.

They went at each other in an exchange into which Paolo Roberto put all his power and all his fury. Left, right, left, left again, and a jab with the right to the face, duck the left hook, back up a step, attack with the right. Every punch landed with solid force.

He was in the biggest battle of his life. He was hitting with his brain as much as with his fists. He managed to avoid every punch his opponent threw at him.

He landed a right hook clear as a bell to the jaw that felt like he had broken a bone in his hand and that should have made his opponent collapse in a heap. He glanced at his knuckles and saw that they were bloody. He could see bruises and a swollen area on the giant’s face. But his opponent seemed not even to feel the blows.

Paolo Roberto backed up, breathed as steadily as he could, and took stock. He’s no boxer. He moves like a boxer, but he can’t box for shit. He’s only pretending. He can’t block. He telegraphs his punches. And he’s as slow as a tortoise.

In the next instant the giant got in a left hook to the side of Paolo Roberto’s rib cage. That was the second time he had connected well. Paolo Roberto felt pain shoot through his body as a rib cracked. Again he backed away, but he tripped over a pile of scaffolding and fell on his back. He saw the giant towering over him, but he flung himself into a roll to the side and staggered to his feet.

He squared up, trying to gather his strength, but the man was on him again. He ducked, ducked again, and backed away, feeling terrible pain each time he parried a blow with his shoulder.

Then came the moment that every boxer has experienced with dread. The feeling that could turn up any time in the middle of a bout. The feeling of just not being good enough. The realization that you are about to lose.

That’s the crux of almost every fight, the moment when the strength drains out of you and the adrenaline pumps so hard that it becomes a burden and surrender appears like a ghost at ringside. That’s the moment that separates the pros from the amateurs and the winner from the loser. Few boxers who find themselves at the edge of that abyss manage to turn the match around, turn certain defeat into victory.

Paolo Roberto was struck by this insight. He felt a roaring in his head that made him dizzy and he experienced the moment as if he were watching the scene from outside, peering at this giant through a camera lens. This was the moment when it was a matter of winning or disappearing for good.

He backed in a wide semicircle to collect his strength and buy time. The man followed him steadily but slowly, precisely as though he knew that the outcome was decided but he wanted to draw the round out. He boxes, but he can’t really box. He knows who I am. He’s a rank amateur. But he has a devastating power in his punch and he seems insensitive to all punishment.

These thoughts rattled around in Paolo Roberto’s head as he tried to decide what to do.

Suddenly he was reliving the night in Mariehamn two years before when his career as a professional boxer had ended in the most brutal way. He had met the Argentine Sebastián Luján, or rather, Sebastián Luján met him. Paolo Roberto had walked into the first knockout of his life and had been unconscious for fifteen seconds.

He often thought about what had gone wrong. He was in tip-top shape. He was focused. But the Argentine had landed a solid punch and the round had been transformed into a raging sea.

Watching the video afterwards, he saw how he had staggered around the ring, as defenceless as Donald Duck. The knockout came twenty-three seconds later.

Sebastián Luján hadn’t been any better, or better trained than he was. The margins of error being so small, the bout could have gone either way.

The only difference he could detect later was that Luján had been hungrier. When Paolo Roberto went into that ring in Mariehamn he was set on winning, but he wasn’t dying to box. It did not mean life or death any more. A loss was not a catastrophe.

A year and a half later he was still a boxer. But he was no longer a pro, and he took on only friendly sparring matches. He went on training, and he had not put on weight or gone soft in the gut. He was not as well-tuned an instrument as before a title bout for which his body had been drilled for months, but he was Paolo Roberto and not some nobody. And unlike Mariehamn, the bout in the warehouse south of Nykvarn literally meant life or death.

He made a decision. He stopped short and let the giant come in close. He feinted with his left and put everything he had behind a right hook. He lashed out with a punch that hit the man across the mouth and nose. His attack was totally unexpected since he had been in retreat for the past few moments. He heard something give way. He followed up with a left-right-left and landed all three in the man’s face.

The man was boxing in slow motion. He struck back with his right.

Paolo Roberto saw the punch coming far in advance and ducked under the huge fist. He saw the giant shift his body weight and knew that he was going to follow up with a left. Instead of blocking, Paolo Roberto leaned back and let the left hook pass in front of his nose. He replied with a massive blow to the body, just below the ribs. When the man turned to meet the attack, Paolo Roberto’s left hook came up and hit him across the nose again.

He suddenly felt that everything he was doing was utterly right and that he was in control of the bout. The giant backed away. His nose was bleeding. He was not smiling now.

Then the giant kicked him.

His foot shot up and took Paolo Roberto by surprise. He had not been expecting a kick. It felt as if a sledgehammer had hit his thigh just above the knee, and pain ran right through his leg. No. He took a step back and his right leg gave way. He was on his back.

The giant looked down at him. For a second their eyes met. The message was unmistakable. The fight was over.

Then the giant’s eyes widened as Miriam Wu kicked him in the crotch from behind.

Every muscle in Miriam Wu’s body was aching, but somehow she had managed to slip her bound hands underneath her and then – agonizingly – over her feet so that she got her arms in front of her body.

She had pain in her ribs, neck, back, and kidneys, and only with difficulty did she get to her feet. Finally she wobbled to the door and looked on wide-eyed as Paolo Roberto – where did he come from? – hit the giant with a right hook and then a combination to the face before he was kicked to the ground.

Miriam Wu realized that she could not care less how or why Paolo Roberto had shown up. He was one of the good guys. But for the first time in her life she felt a murderous desire to damage another human being. She took a few quick steps forward, mobilizing every bit of energy and all the muscles she had intact. She came up to the giant from behind and landed a kick in his balls. It may not have been elegant Thai boxing, but the kick had the desired effect.

Miriam Wu nodded to herself. Men could be as big as a house and made of granite, but they all had balls in the same place. For the first time the man looked shaken. He gave a moan, grabbed at his crotch, and went down on one knee.

Wu stood indecisive until she realized that she had to do more to try to end this. She was going to kick him in the face, but to her amazement he lifted an arm. It should have been impossible for him to recover so fast. And it had felt like kicking a tree trunk. He grabbed her foot, dragged her down, and began to haul her in. She saw him raise a fist and she twisted desperately, kicking with her free leg. She hit him above the ear at the same instant his blow struck her on the temple. She saw lightning and blackness alternating before her eyes.

The giant began to scramble to his feet.

That was when Paolo Roberto swung a plank into the back of his head. The man fell forward and landed with a crash.

Paolo Roberto looked around as if in a dream. The giant was writhing on the floor. The girl had a glassy look and seemed to be totally drained. Their combined efforts had bought them only a brief respite.

Paolo Roberto could barely support himself on his injured leg, and he was afraid that a muscle had torn just above his knee. He limped over to Miriam Wu and pulled her to her feet. She began to move again, but her eyes could not seem to focus. Without a word he slung her over his shoulder and started hobbling towards the door. The pain in his right knee was acute.

It was exhilarating to come out into the dark, cold air. But he had no time to pause. He navigated across the yard and into the curtain of woods, the same way he had come. He was no sooner in the trees than he tripped over a root and tumbled to the ground. Miriam Wu moaned and he heard the door of the warehouse slam open with a crash.

The giant was a monumental silhouette in the bright rectangle of the doorway. Paolo Roberto put a hand over the girl’s mouth. He bent down and whispered in her ear to be utterly still and quiet.

Then he groped among the roots of a fallen tree and found a stone that was bigger than his fist. He made the sign of the cross. For the first time in his sinful life he was ready to kill another human being, if it proved necessary. He was so shattered that he knew he would not be able to go another round. But nobody, not even a freak of nature, could go on fighting with a crushed skull. He squeezed the rock and felt that it was oval-shaped with a sharp edge.

The man went unsteadily to the corner of the building and then made a long sweep across the yard. He stopped less than ten paces from where Paolo Roberto was holding his breath. He listened and peered around – but he could only guess which way they had disappeared into the night. After a few minutes he seemed to realize that the search was futile. He went back into the building with quick determination and was gone for a minute or so. He turned off the lights and then came out with a bag and walked over to the Volvo. He drove off down the access road. Paolo Roberto listened until he could no longer hear the sound of the engine. When he looked down he saw a pair of eyes gleaming in the dark.

“Hi, Miriam,” he said. “My name is Paolo – you don’t have to be afraid of me.”

“I know.”

Her voice was weak. He slumped exhausted against the fallen tree and felt his adrenaline dropping to zero.

“I don’t know how I’m going to get up,” he said. “But I have a car on the other side of the main road.”

The blond giant was shaken and dazed and had a strange feeling in his head. He braked and turned into a side road east of Nykvarn.

For the first time in his life he had been beaten in a fight. And the one who had dished out the punishment was Paolo Roberto… the boxer. It felt like an absurd dream, the kind he might have on a restless night. He could not understand where the boxer had come from. Out of the blue he was just there, standing inside the warehouse.

It made no sense.

He had not even felt the punches. That did not surprise him. But he had felt the kick in the balls. And that terrific thump on the head had made him black out. Gingerly he explored the back of his neck and touched an enormous lump. He pressed with his fingers but he sensed no pain. And yet he felt groggy. He had lost a tooth on the left side of his upper jaw. His mouth was full of the taste of blood. He held his nose between his thumb and forefinger and bent it experimentally upwards. He heard a snapping sound inside his head and could tell that his nose was broken.

He had done the right thing in taking his bag and leaving the warehouse before the police could get there. But he had made a colossal mistake. On the Discovery Channel he had seen how crime scene investigators could find any amount of forensic evidence. Blood. Hair. DNA.

He didn’t have the slightest desire to return to the warehouse, but he had no choice. He had to clean up. He made a U-turn and started back.

Just before Nykvarn he passed a car coming the other way, but he thought no more about it.

The trip back to Stockholm was a nightmare. Paolo Roberto had blood in his eyes and was so beaten up that his whole body hurt. He was driving like a drunk, weaving all over the road. He wiped his eyes with one hand and tentatively felt his nose. It really hurt, and he had to breathe through his mouth. He kept looking out for a white Volvo and thought he saw one pass going the other way near Nykvarn.

When he got on the E20 the driving was a little easier. He thought about stopping in Södertälje, but he had no idea where to go. He glanced back at the girl, still in handcuffs, lying on the backseat without a seat belt. He had had to carry her to the car, and as soon as she landed on the seat she went out like a light. He didn’t know if she had fainted from her wounds or shut down out of sheer exhaustion.

He hesitated, then turned onto the E4 and headed for Stockholm.

Blomkvist had slept only an hour before the telephone started ringing. He squinted at the clock and saw that it was just past 4:00 a.m. He reached groggily for the receiver. It was Berger, and at first he could not understand what she was saying.

“Paolo Roberto is where?”

“At the hospital in Söder with the Wu girl. He tried to reach you, but you weren’t answering.”

“I turned my mobile off. What the hell is he doing in the hospital?”

Berger’s voice sounded patient but determined.

“Mikael, get a taxi over there right away and find out. He sounded totally confused and was talking about a chain saw and some building out in the woods and a monster who couldn’t box.”

Blomkvist blinked himself awake. Then he shook his head and made for the shower.

Paolo Roberto looked miserable lying there in his shorts on the hospital bed. Blomkvist had waited an hour to be allowed to see him. His nose was hidden beneath a bandage. His left eye was covered too and one eyebrow had surgical tape over five stitches. He had a bandage wrapped round his chest, and cuts and bruises all over his body. His right knee was in a brace.

Blomkvist offered him a coffee from the machine in the hall and inspected his face critically.

“You look like a car crash,” he said. “Tell me what happened.”

Paolo Roberto shook his head and met Blomkvist’s gaze. “A fucking monster happened,” he said.

He shook his head again and inspected his fists. His knuckles were so swollen that he could scarcely hold the cup. His right hand and wrist were in a splint. His girlfriend already had a lukewarm attitude towards boxing – now she was going to be furious.

“I’m a boxer,” he said. “I mean, when I was active I wasn’t afraid to step into the ring with anybody. I’ve taken a punch or two, but I know how to dish them out too. When I punch somebody they’re supposed to sit down and hurt.”

“But this one didn’t do that.”

Paolo Roberto shook his head for the third time. Then he told Blomkvist what had happened during the night.

“I hit him at least thirty times. Fourteen or fifteen times to the head. I hit him on the jaw four times. At first I was holding back a bit – I didn’t want to kill him, just protect myself. But in the end I gave it everything I had. One of my punches should have broken his jaw. But that fucking monster just shook his head a little and kept on coming. That is not a normal human being, I swear to God.”

“What did he look like?”

“He was built like a tank. I’m not exaggerating. He was over six foot six and weighed at least 300 pounds. All muscle and armour plating. A fucking giant who doesn’t know what pain is.”

“You’ve never seen him before?”

“Never. He had no idea how to box. I could feint and throw him off his guard and he didn’t have a clue how to move to avoid being hit. He was out of it. But at the same time he tried to move like a boxer. He held his arms up the right way and he kept recovering to a starting stance. Maybe he’d trained in boxing but hadn’t heard a word of what the trainer said. What saved my life – and the girl’s – was that he moved so slowly. He would throw roundhouse swings that he telegraphed a month in advance, and I could duck or parry them. He got in two good punches on me – one to the face, and you see what that did, then one to the body, where he cracked a rib. But neither of them was full power. If he’d landed them properly he would have knocked my head off.”

Paolo Roberto laughed, a bubbling sort of laugh.

“What’s funny?”

“I won. That moron tried to kill me and I won. I actually decked him. But I had to use a fucking plank to get him down for the count.”

He turned serious again. “If Miriam Wu hadn’t kicked him in the balls at just the right moment, I don’t want to think about how the hell it would have ended.”

“Paolo – I’m really, really glad you won. Miriam is going to say the same thing when she wakes up. Have you heard how she’s doing?”

“She looks about the same as I do. She has a concussion, several cracked ribs, a broken nose, and damage to her kidneys.”

Blomkvist bent forward and put his hand on Paolo Roberto’s good knee. “If you ever need me to do anything…” he said.

Paolo Roberto smiled. “Blomkvist – if you ever need a favour again…”

“Yes?”

“… ask Sebastián Luján to do it for you.”

CHAPTER 26

Inspector Bublanski was in a dismal mood when he met Modig in the parking lot outside the hospital just before 7:00. Blomkvist had woken him up, and he in turn called Modig and woke her up. They met Blomkvist by the entrance and went with him to Paolo Roberto’s room.

Bublanski could hardly grasp the bewildering details, but what was eventually clear was that Wu had been kidnapped and that the boxer had beaten up the kidnapper. Except that to judge by his face, it was far from obvious who had beaten up whom. As far as Bublanski was concerned, the night’s events had lifted the investigation of Lisbeth Salander to a whole new level of complication. Nothing in this infernal case seemed to be normal.

How had Paolo Roberto even gotten involved in the affair?

“I’m a good friend of Lisbeth Salander’s,” he told them.

Bublanski and Modig looked at each other, surprised and sceptical.

“She sparred with me at the gym.”

Bublanski fixed his gaze somewhere on the wall behind Paolo Roberto. Modig could not help laughing out loud. After a while they had written down all the details he could give them.

“I’d like to make a few points,” Blomkvist said dryly.

They turned to him.

“First of all, Paolo’s description of the man who drove away from the warehouse in the van matches the one I gave of the person who attacked Salander at the same spot on Lundagatan. A tall guy with a light brown ponytail and a beer belly. OK?”

Bublanski nodded.

“Second, the point of the kidnapping was to force Miriam Wu to reveal where Lisbeth Salander is hiding. So these two thugs have been looking for Salander since at least a week before the murders. Agreed?”

Modig murmured a “yes.”

“Third, it looks less likely that Salander is the lone nutcase she has been portrayed as. And neither of these maniacs seems, on the face of it, to be a member of a lesbian Satanist gang.”

Neither Bublanski nor Modig said a word.

“And finally, number four. I think this story has something to do with a man called Zala. Dag Svensson did a lot of work on him in his last two weeks. All the relevant information is in his computer. Dag linked him to the murder of a prostitute named Irina Petrova in Södertälje. The autopsy recorded that she was very severely beaten. So severely that any one of three of the worst blows would have been fatal on its own. Her injuries sound very like the ones that Miriam Wu and Paolo Roberto have been subjected to. In both cases the instruments of this extraordinary violence could be the hands of a gigantic thug.”

“And Bjurman?” Bublanski said. “Let’s suppose that someone had a reason to silence Svensson. Who would have had a motive to murder Salander’s guardian?”

“All the pieces of the puzzle aren’t in place yet, but there’s a connection between Bjurman and Zala. That’s the only credible solution. Could you agree to start thinking along new lines? I think that these crimes have something to do with the sex trade. And Salander would sooner die than be involved in something like that. I told you she’s a damned moralist.”

“So what was her role? What was she doing at Svensson and Johansson’s apartment?”

“I don’t know. Witness? Opponent? Maybe she was there to warn Dag and Mia that their lives were in danger.”

Bublanski set the wheels in motion. He called the Södertälje police and gave them Paolo Roberto’s directions to a dilapidated warehouse southwest of Lake Yngern. Then he called Holmberg – he lived in Flemingsberg and was closest of the team to Södertälje – and asked him to join up with the Södertälje police as soon as he possibly could to assist with the crime scene investigation.

Holmberg called back an hour later. He had arrived at the crime scene. The Södertälje police had had no difficulty finding the warehouse. Along with two smaller storage sheds it had burned to the ground, and the fire department was there now, mopping up. There were two discarded gasoline cans in the yard.

Bublanski felt a sense of frustration approaching fury.

What the hell was going on? Who were these thugs? Who was this Salander person really? And why was it impossible to find her?

The situation did not improve when Ekström joined the fray at the 9:00 meeting. Bublanski told him about the morning’s dramatic developments and proposed that the search be reprioritized in light of the mysterious events that had taken place, which cast doubt on the scenario that the team had been working on.

Paolo Roberto’s story reinforced Blomkvist’s account of the attack on Salander on Lundagatan. The hypothesis that all three murders were committed by one mentally ill woman no longer seemed valid. The suspicions regarding Salander could not altogether be discarded – they needed an explanation for her fingerprints being on the murder weapon – but it did mean that the investigation had to work on the possibility of a different killer. There was only one theory at present – Blomkvist’s belief that the murders had to do with Svensson’s imminent exposé of the sex trade. Bublanski identified three significant points.

The prime task was to find and identify the abnormally large man and his associate with the ponytail who had kidnapped and assaulted Miriam Wu. The giant should be relatively easy to find.

Andersson reminded them that Salander also had an unusual appearance, and that after three weeks of searching, the police still had no idea where she was.

The second task was to add to the investigative team a group that would actively focus on the list of prostitutes’ clients in Svensson’s computer. There was a logistical problem associated with this. The team had Svensson’s computer from Millennium and the Zip disks that held the backup of his missing laptop, but they contained several years’ worth of collected research and thousands of pages. It would take time to catalogue and study them. The team needed reinforcements, and Bublanski detailed Modig to head that unit.

The third task was to focus on a person who went by the name of Zala. The team would enlist the assistance of the National Criminal Investigation Department, since they apparently had come across the name. He assigned that task to Faste.

Finally, Andersson was to coordinate the continued search for Salander.

Bublanski’s report took six minutes, but it touched off an hour-long dispute. Faste was vociferous in his resistance to Bublanski’s proposals, and he made no attempt to conceal this. His opinion was that the investigation, regardless of the new – peripheral, he called it – information, had to stay focused on Salander. The chain of evidence was so strong that it was unreasonable to divide the effort into different channels.

“This is all bullshit. We have a violence-prone nutcase who has grown worse and worse over the years. Do you actually believe that all the psychiatric reports and results from forensics are a joke? She’s tied to the crime scene. We know she’s a hooker, and there’s a large sum of money unaccounted for in her bank account.”

“I’m aware of all that.”

“She’s also a member of some sort of lesbian sex cult. And I’ll be damned if that dyke Cilla Norén doesn’t know more than she’s letting on.”

Bublanski raised his voice. “Faste. Stop it. You’re totally obsessed with this gay angle. It’s way past professional.”

He at once regretted speaking out in front of the whole group. A private talk with Faste would have been more productive. Finally Ekström interrupted the raised voices to approve Bublanski’s plan of action.

Bublanski glanced at Bohman and Hedström.

“As I understand it, we only have you for three more days, so let’s make the best of the situation. Bohman, can you help Andersson track down Salander? Hedström, you’ll stay with Modig.”

Ekström raised his hand as they were about to break up.

“One last thing. We’re keeping the part about Paolo Roberto under our hats. The media will go ballistic if one more celebrity springs to light in this investigation. So not a word about it outside this room.”

After the meeting Modig took Bublanski aside.

“It was unprofessional of me to lose patience with Faste,” Bublanski said.

“I know how it feels,” she said with a smile. “I started on Svensson’s computer last Monday.”

“I know. How far did you get?”

“He had a dozen versions of the manuscript and a huge amount of research material, and I don’t know yet what’s important and what’s safe to ignore. Just cataloguing it with meaningful names and looking through all the documents will take several days.”

“What about Hedström?”

Modig hesitated. Then she turned and closed Bublanski’s door.

“To tell you the truth… I don’t want to trash him, but he isn’t much help.”

Bublanski frowned. “Out with it.”

“I don’t know, he’s obviously not a real policeman like Bohman. He talks a lot of drivel. He has about the same attitude towards Miriam Wu as Faste does, and he’s totally uninterested in the assignment. And – although I can’t put my finger on it – he has some kind of problem with Salander.”

“How so?”

“I’ve got a feeling there’s some bad blood between them.”

Bublanski nodded slowly. “That’s a shame. Bohman’s OK, but I don’t really like having outsiders involved in this investigation.”

“So what shall we do?”

“You’ll have to put up with him for the rest of the week. Armansky said they’ll break it off if they don’t get results. Keep digging and count on having to do the whole job yourself.”

Modig was interrupted after only forty-five minutes. She was called to Ekström’s office. Bublanski was with him. Both men were red in the face. Tony Scala, the freelance journalist, had just released a scoop with the news that Paolo Roberto had rescued the S&M dyke Miriam Wu from an unknown kidnapper. The article contained several details that could only be known to someone inside the investigation. It was written in such a way as to suggest that the police were considering filing charges against Paolo Roberto for assault.

Ekström had already received several phone calls from other papers that wanted news about the boxer’s role. He was livid. He accused Modig of having leaked the story. Modig vigorously objected to the accusation, but in vain. Ekström wanted her off the investigation.

“Sonja says she didn’t leak anything,” Bublanski said. “That’s good enough for me. It’s insane to remove an experienced detective who’s familiar with every detail of the case.”

Ekström refused to budge.

“Modig, I can’t prove that you leaked the information, but I have no confidence in you with regard to this investigation. You are relieved from the team, effective immediately. Take the rest of the week off. You’ll be given other assignments on Monday.”

Modig nodded and headed for the door. Bublanski stopped her.

“Sonja. For the record: I don’t believe one word of this, and you have my full confidence. But I’m not the one who decides. See me in my office before you go home, please.”

Bublanski’s face had taken on a dangerous hue. Ekström looked furious.

Modig went back to her office, where she and Hedström had been working on Svensson’s computer. She was angry and close to tears. Hedström could tell that something was wrong, but he said nothing and she ignored him. She sat at her desk and stared into space. There was an oppressive silence in the room.

After a while Hedström excused himself and said he had to get a cup of coffee. He asked if he could bring her one. She shook her head.

When he had left she got up and put on her jacket. She took her shoulder bag and went to Bublanski’s office. He pointed to the visitor’s chair.

“Sonja, I don’t intend to yield in this matter unless Ekström removes me from the investigation too. I won’t accept it and I’m thinking of filing a complaint. Until you hear otherwise from me, you’ll remain on the team. At my direction. Understand?”

She nodded.

“You will not take the rest of the week off as Ekström said. I want you to go to Millennium’s offices and have another talk with Blomkvist. Ask him for help in guiding you through Dag Svensson’s hard drive. They have a copy there. We can save a lot of time if we have somebody who’s already familiar with the material picking out the things that might be important.”

Modig breathed more easily.

“I didn’t say anything to Hedström.”

“I’ll take care of him. He can help Andersson. Have you seen Faste?”

“No. He left right after the meeting.”

Bublanski sighed.

Blomkvist had arrived home from the hospital at 8:00 a.m. He had had too little sleep and he had to be at his best for an afternoon meeting with Björck in Smådalarö. He undressed, set the alarm for 10:30, and got two more hours of much-needed sleep. He shaved, showered, and put on a clean shirt. As he was driving past Gullmarsplan, Modig called his mobile. Blomkvist explained that he would not be able to meet her. She told him what she needed, and he referred her to Berger.

When she arrived at Millennium’s offices, Modig found that she liked the self-confident and slightly domineering woman with the dimples and shock of short blond hair. She vaguely wondered whether Berger was a dyke too, since all the women in this investigation, according to Faste, seemed to have that inclination. But then she remembered that she had read somewhere that Berger was married to the artist Greger Beckman.

“There’s a problem here,” Berger said, after listening to her request.

“What’s that?”

“It’s not that we don’t want to solve the murders or help the police. Besides, you already have all the material in the computer you took from here. The dilemma is an ethical one. The media and the police don’t work very well together.”

“Believe me, I found that out this morning,” Modig said with a smile.

“How so?”

“Nothing. Just a personal reflection.”

“OK. To maintain their credibility, the media have to keep a clear distance from the authorities. Journalists who run to the police station and cooperate with police investigations will end up being errand boys for the police.”

“I’ve met some of those,” Modig said. “But the opposite can also be true. And the police end up running errands for certain newspapers.”

Berger laughed. “That’s right. I’m afraid to say that at Millennium we simply can’t afford to be associated with that sort of mercenary journalism. This isn’t about you wanting to question any of Millennium’s staff – which we would allow without hesitation – but about a formal request for us to assist actively in a police investigation by placing our journalistic material at your disposal.”

Modig nodded.

“There are two points of view on that,” Berger said. “First, one of our journalists has been murdered. So we will help out all we can. But the second point is that there are some things we cannot and will not give to the police. And that has to do with our sources.”

“I can be flexible. I can pledge to protect your sources.”

“It’s not a matter of your intent or our trust in you. It is that we never reveal a source, no matter what the circumstances.”

“Understood.”

“Then there’s the fact that at Millennium we’re conducting our own investigation into the murders, which should be viewed as a journalistic assignment. In this case I’m prepared to hand over information to the police when we have something finished that we are ready to publish – but not before.” Berger frowned as she paused to think. “I also have to be able to live with myself. Let’s do this… You can work with Malin Eriksson. She’s familiar with the material and competent to decide where the boundaries lie. She’ll guide you through Dag’s book – with the objective of compiling a list of all those who might be suspects.”

As she caught the shuttle train from Södra station to Södertälje, Irene Nesser was unaware of the drama that had occurred the night before. She was wearing a midlength black leather jacket, dark pants, and a neat red sweater. She wore glasses that she had pushed up on her forehead.

In Södertälje she walked to the Strängnäs bus and bought a ticket to Stallarholmen. She got off the bus a little south of Stallarholmen just after 11:00 a.m. There were no buildings in sight. She visualized the map in her head. Lake Mälaren was a few miles to the northeast. It was summer-cabin country, with a scattering of year-round residences. Bjurman’s property was about two miles from the bus stop. She took a swallow of water from her bottle and started walking. She got there about forty-five minutes later.

She began by making a tour of the area and studying the neighbouring houses. About a hundred and fifty yards to the right, she saw the next cabin. Nobody was at home. To the left was a ravine. She passed two summer houses before she reached a group of cabins where she noticed signs of life: an open window and the sound of a radio. But that was three hundred yards from Bjurman’s cabin. She could work undisturbed.

She had taken the keys from his apartment. Once inside, she first unscrewed a window shutter at the back of the house, giving her an escape route in case any unpleasantness should occur at the front. The unpleasantness she was prepared for was that some cop might get the idea to show up at the cabin.

Bjurman’s was one of the older buildings, with one main room, one bedroom, and a small kitchen with running water. The toilet was a compost outhouse in the backyard. She spent twenty minutes looking through the closets, wardrobes, and dressers. She did not find so much as one scrap of paper that could have anything to do with Lisbeth Salander or Zala.

Then she went and searched the outhouse and woodshed. She found nothing of interest, and no paperwork at all. The journey had apparently been in vain.

She sat on the porch and drank some water and ate an apple.

When she went to close the shutter, she stopped short in the hallway as she caught sight of an aluminium stepladder three feet high. She went into the main room again and examined the clapboard ceiling. The opening to the attic was almost invisible between two roof beams. She got the stepladder, opened the trapdoor, and immediately found two A4 file boxes, each containing several folders and various other documents.

Things had gone all wrong. One disaster had followed another. The blond giant was worried.

Sandström had gotten hold of the Rantas. They said he sounded terrified and reported that the journalist Svensson had been planning an exposé about his whoring activities and about the Rantas. So far it hadn’t been a big deal. If the media exposed Sandström it was none of his business, and the Ranta brothers could lie low for as long as they needed to. They had taken the Baltic Star to Estonia for a vacation. It was unlikely that the whole mess would lead to a court case, but if the worst should happen they had done time before. It was part of the job description.

More troublesome was that Salander had managed to elude Magge Lundin. This was incredible, since Salander was a rag doll compared to Lundin. All he had to do was stuff her in a car and take her to the warehouse south of Nykvarn.

Then Sandström had received another visit, and this time Svensson was after Zala. That put everything in a whole new light. Between Bjurman’s panic and Svensson’s continued snooping, a potentially dangerous situation had arisen.

An amateur is a gangster who is not prepared to take the consequences. Bjurman was a rank amateur. The giant had advised Zala not to have anything to do with Bjurman, but for Zala the name Lisbeth Salander had been irresistible. He loathed Salander. It was a reflex, like pressing a button.

It was pure chance that he had been at Bjurman’s place the night Svensson called. The same fucking journalist who had already caused problems for Sandström and the Rantas. He had gone to Bjurman’s to calm him down or to threaten him, as needed, after the abortive attempt to kidnap Salander. Svensson’s call had triggered a wild panic in Bjurman, a reaction of unreasonable stupidity. All of a sudden he wanted out.

To top it off, Bjurman had fetched his cowboy pistol to threaten him. The giant had just looked at Bjurman in surprise and had taken the gun from him. He was already wearing gloves, so fingerprints weren’t a problem. He had no choice. Bjurman had obviously flipped out.

Bjurman knew about Zala, of course. That was why he was a liability. The giant couldn’t really explain why he made Bjurman take off his clothes, except that he hated the lawyer and wanted to make that clear to him. He had almost lost it when he saw the tattoo on Bjurman’s abdomen: I AM A SADISTIC PIG, A PERVERT, AND A RAPIST.

For a moment he almost felt sorry for the man. He was such a total idiot. But he was in a business where such feelings could not be allowed to interfere with what they had to do. So he had led Bjurman into the bedroom, forced him to his knees, and used a pillow as a silencer.

He had spent five minutes searching through Bjurman’s apartment for the slightest connection to Zala. The only thing he found was his own mobile number. To be on the safe side he took Bjurman’s mobile with him.

Svensson was the next problem. When Bjurman was found dead, Svensson would inevitably call the police and tell them about his call to the lawyer to ask about Zala. Zala would then become the object of police interest.

The blond giant considered himself smart, but he had an enormous respect for Zala’s almost uncanny strategic gifts. They had been working together for nearly twelve years. It had been a successful decade, and he looked up to Zala with reverence. He could listen for hours as Zala explained human nature and its weaknesses and how one could profit from them.

But quite unexpectedly their business dealings were in trouble.

He had driven straight from Bjurman’s to Enskede and parked the white Volvo two streets away. As luck would have it, the front door of the building was not locked. He went up and rang the doorbell with the nameplate SVENSSON-JOHANSSON.

He had fired two shots – there was a woman in the apartment too. He didn’t search the apartment or take any of their papers with him. He did take a computer that was on the table in the living room. He turned on his heel, went down the stairs, and out to his car. His only mistake had been dropping the revolver on the stairs while he was trying to balance the laptop and at the same time fish out his car keys. He stopped for a second, but the gun had skittered down the stairs to the basement, and he decided it would take too much time to go down and get it. He knew he was someone people would not forget having seen, so the important thing was to get out of there before anyone laid eyes on him.

The dropped revolver had been at first a source of criticism until Zala realized its implications. They were astonished when the police began a search for Salander. His mistake had turned into an incredible stroke of luck.

It also created a new problem. Salander became the only remaining weak link. She had known Bjurman and she knew Zala. She could put two and two together. When he and Zala conferred about the matter they were in agreement. They had to find Salander and bury her somewhere. It would be ideal if she were never found. Then the murder investigation would eventually be shelved.

They had taken a chance that Miriam Wu could lead them to Salander. And then everything had gone wrong again. Paolo Roberto. Of all people. Out of nowhere. And according to the newspapers he was also friends with Salander.

The giant was dumbfounded.

After Nykvarn he had gone to Lundin’s house in Svavelsjö, only a hundred yards from Svavelsjö MC’s headquarters. Not an ideal hiding place, but he didn’t have many options. He had to find somewhere to lie low until the bruises on his face began to fade and he could make himself scarce. He fingered his broken nose and felt the lump on his neck. The swelling had begun to subside.

It had been a good move to go back and burn down the whole fucking place.

Then, suddenly, he went ice cold.

Bjurman. He had met Bjurman once at his summer cabin. In early February – when Zala had accepted the job of taking care of Salander. Bjurman had had a file about Salander that he had leafed through. How could he have forgotten that? It could lead to Zala.

He went down to the kitchen and told Lundin to get himself to Stallarholmen as fast as he could and start another fire.

Bublanski spent his lunch break trying to put in order the investigation he knew was about to collapse. He spent time with Andersson and Bohman, who brought him up to date on the hunt for Salander. Tips had come in from Göteborg and Norrköping. Göteborg they ruled out right away, but the Norrköping sighting had potential. They informed their colleagues, and a cautious stakeout was put on an address where a girl who looked a little like Salander had been seen.

He tried to find Faste, but he was not in the building and did not answer his mobile. After the stormy meeting, Faste had vanished.

Bublanski then went to see Ekström to try to defuse the problem with Modig. He set out all his reasons for thinking the decision to take her off the case was foolhardy. Ekström would not listen, and Bublanski decided to file a complaint after the weekend. It was an idiotic situation.

Just after 3:00 he stepped into the corridor and saw Hedström coming out of Modig’s office, where he was still supposed to be combing through Svensson’s hard drive. Bublanski thought it was now a meaningless exercise, since no real detective was looking over his shoulder to check what he might have missed. He decided that Hedström should be with Andersson for the rest of the week.

Before he had a chance to say anything, Hedström disappeared into the toilet at the far end of the corridor. Bublanski went over to Modig’s empty office to wait for him to return.

Then his eye fell on Hedström’s mobile, which lay forgotten on the shelf behind his desk.

Bublanski glanced at the door to the toilet, still closed. On pure impulse he stepped into the office, stuffed Hedström’s mobile into his pocket, walked rapidly back to his own office, and closed the door. He clicked up the list of calls.

At 9:57, five minutes after the morning meeting was over, Hedström had called a number with an 070 area code. Bublanski lifted the receiver of his desk telephone and dialled the number. Tony Scala answered.

He hung up and stared at Hedström’s mobile. Then he got up with an expression like a thundercloud. He had taken two steps towards the door when his telephone rang. He went back to pick it up and shouted his name into the receiver.

“It’s Jerker. I’m back at the warehouse outside Nykvarn.”

“What did you find?”

“The fire is out. We’ve been busy the last two hours. The Södertälje police brought a corpse-sniffing dog to check the area in case there was someone in the wreckage.”

“Was there?”

“There was not. But we took a break so the dog could rest his nose for a while. The handler says it’s necessary since the smells at an arson site are really strong.”

“Get to the point, Jerker. I’m a bit pressed here.”

“Well, he took a walk and let the dog loose away from the site of the fire. The dog signalled a spot about seventy-five yards into the woods behind the warehouse. We started digging. Ten minutes ago we found a human leg with a shoe. It seems to be a man’s shoe. It was buried fairly shallow.”

“Oh shit. Jerker, you’ve got to –”

“I’ve already taken command of the site and put a stop to the digging. I want to get forensics out here and proper techs before we proceed.”

“Very well done.”

“But that’s not all. Five minutes ago the dog marked another spot some eighty yards from the first.”

Salander had made coffee on Bjurman’s stove and eaten another apple. She spent two hours reading through Bjurman’s notes on her, page by page. She was actually impressed. He had put quite a lot of effort into the task and systematized the information. He had found material about her that she didn’t even know existed.

She read Palmgren’s journal with mixed feelings. It took up two black notebooks. He had started keeping a diary about her when she was fifteen. She had just run away from her third set of foster parents, an elderly couple in Sigtuna; he was a sociologist and she was an author of children’s books. Salander had stayed with them for twelve days and could tell that they were tremendously proud of making a social contribution by taking her in, and that they expected her constantly to express gratitude. She had finally had enough when her foster mother, boasting to a neighbour, started expounding about how important it was that someone took care of young people who had obvious problems. I’m not a fucking social project, she wanted to scream. On the twelfth day she stole 100 kronor from their food money and took the bus to Upplands-Väsby and the shuttle train to Stockholm Central. The police found her six weeks later in the house of a sixty-seven-year-old man in Haninge.

He had been an OK guy. He provided her with food and a place to live. She did not have to do much in return. He wanted to look at her when she was naked. He never touched her. She knew he would be considered a pedophile, but she had never felt the least threat from him. She thought him an introverted and socially handicapped person. She even came to experience a feeling of kinship when she thought about him. They were both outsiders.

Someone had finally spotted her and called the police. A social worker did her best to persuade her to report the man for sexual assault. She had obstinately refused to say that anything untoward had occurred, and in any case she was fifteen and legal. Fuck you. Then Palmgren had intervened and signed for her. He started a diary in what appeared to be a frustrated attempt to allay and resolve his own doubts. The first entries were written in December 1993:

L. increasingly appears to be the most unmanageable young person I’ve ever had to deal with. The question is whether I’m doing the right thing when I oppose her return to St.Stefan’s. She has now run away from three foster families in three months and obviously risks coming to some harm during her excursions. I have to decide soon whether I should give up the assignment and request that she be put under the care of real experts. I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong. Today I had a serious talk with her.

Salander remembered every word of that serious talk. It was the day before Christmas Eve. Palmgren had taken her to his place and installed her in his spare room. He made spaghetti with meat sauce for supper and then put her on the living-room sofa and sat in an armchair across from her. She remembered wondering if Palmgren too wanted to see her naked. Instead he spoke to her as if she were a grown-up.

In fact it had been a two-hour monologue. She had hardly uttered a word. He had spelled out the realities, which were in effect that now she had to decide between going back to St.Stefan’s and living with a foster family. He would do what he could to find a family acceptable to her, and he insisted that she go with his choice. He had decided that she should spend the Christmas holidays with him so she would have time to think about her future. It was up to her, but on the day after Christmas he wanted a clear answer and a promise from her that if she had problems she would turn to him instead of running away. Then he had sent her to bed and apparently sat down to write the first lines in his diary.

The threat of being transported back to St.Stefan’s frightened her more than Holger Palmgren could know. She spent an unhappy Christmas suspiciously watching every move he made. The next day he still had not attempted to paw her, nor did he show any sign of wanting to sneak a look at her in the bath. On the contrary, he got really angry when she tried to provoke him by marching naked from his spare room to the bathroom. He had slammed the bathroom door hard. Later she had made him the promises he demanded. She had kept her word. Well, more or less.

In his journal Palmgren commented methodically on every meeting he had with her. Sometimes it was three lines, sometimes he filled several pages with his thoughts. Every so often she was surprised. Palmgren had been more insightful than she had imagined, and occasionally commented on incidents when she had tried to fool him but he had seen through her.

Then she opened the police report from 1991.

And the pieces of the puzzle fell into place. She felt as if the ground had started to shake.

She read the medical report written by a Dr. Jesper H. Löderman, in which Dr. Peter Teleborian figured prominently. Löderman had been the prosecutor’s trump card when he tried to get her institutionalized at the hearing when she was eighteen.

Then she found an envelope containing correspondence between Teleborian and some policeman called Gunnar Björck. The letters were all dated 1991, just after “All The Evil” happened.

Nothing was said straight out in the correspondence, but suddenly a trapdoor opened beneath Salander. It took her several minutes to grasp the implications. Björck referred to some conversation they must have had. His wording was irreproachable, but between the lines he was saying that it would be all right with him if Salander were locked up in an asylum for the rest of her life.

Regarding the current matter. Salander rolled the phrase around in her mind for a while.

Teleborian was responsible for her care at St.Stefan’s. It had been no accident. The tone of the correspondence led her to understand that these letters were never intended to see the light of day.

Teleborian had known Björck.

Salander bit her lower lip as she pondered. She had never done any research on Teleborian, but he had started out in forensic medicine, and even the Security Police occasionally needed to consult a forensic medical expert or psychiatrist for their investigations. If she started digging, she would surely find a connection. At some point during his career, Teleborian and Björck’s paths had crossed. When Björck needed someone who could bury Salander, he had turned to Teleborian.

That was how it had happened. What previously looked like chance now took on a whole new dimension.

She sat still for a long time staring into space. Nobody was innocent. There were only varying degrees of responsibility. And somebody was responsible for Salander. She would definitely have to pay a visit to Smådalarö. She assumed that no-one in the shipwreck that was the state justice system would have any desire to discuss the subject with her, and in the absence of anyone else, a talk with Gunnar Björck would have to do.

She looked forward to that talk.

She did not need to take all the folders with her. As she read them they became forever imprinted on her photographic memory. She took along Palmgren’s notebooks, Björck’s police report from 1991, the medical report from 1996 when she was declared incompetent, and the correspondence between Teleborian and Björck. That was enough to fill her backpack.

She closed the door, but before she had time to lock it she heard the sound of motorcycles behind her. She looked around. It was too late to try to hide, and she didn’t have the slightest chance of outrunning two bikers on Harley-Davidsons. She stepped down warily from the porch and met them in the driveway.

Bublanski marched furiously down the corridor and saw that Hedström had not yet returned to Modig’s office. But the toilet was vacant. He continued down the corridor and found him holding a plastic cup from the coffee vending machine, talking to Andersson and Bohman.

Bublanski turned unseen at the doorway and walked up one flight to Ekström’s office. He shoved the door open without knocking, interrupting Ekström in the middle of a phone conversation.

“Come with me,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” Ekström said.

“Put the telephone down and come with me.”

Bublanski’s expression was such that Ekström did as he was told. In this situation it was easy to understand why Bublanski had been given the nickname Officer Bubble. His face looked like a bright red antiaircraft balloon. They went downstairs. Bublanski marched up to Hedström, took a firm grip on his hair, and turned him to Ekström.

“Hey, what the hell are you doing? Are you crazy?”

“Bublanski!” Ekström shouted, startled.

Hedström looked nervous. Bohman’s mouth dropped open.

“Is this yours?” Bublanski asked, holding out the Sony Ericsson mobile.

“Let me go!”

“IS THIS YOUR MOBILE?”

“Yeah, damn it. Let me go.”

“Not yet. You’re under arrest.”

“I’m what?”

“You’re under arrest for breach of secrecy and for interfering with a police investigation. Or else give us a reasonable explanation for why, according to your list of calls, you called a journalist who answers to the name of Tony Scala at 9:57 this morning, right after the meeting and just before Scala went public with the very information we had decided to keep secret.”

After getting instructions to go to Stallarholmen and set a fire, Lundin had wandered over to the clubhouse in the abandoned printing factory on the outskirts of Svavelsjö and taken Nieminen with him. It was perfect weather to roll out the hogs for the first time since winter. He had been given detailed directions and had studied a map. They put on their leathers and covered the distance from Svavelsjö to Stallarholmen in no time.

Lundin did not believe his eyes when he saw Lisbeth Salander in the driveway in front of Bjurman’s summer cabin. It was a bonus that would blow the giant’s fucking mind. He was sure it was her, although she looked different. Was that a wig? She was just standing there, waiting for them.

They rode up and parked six feet away on each side of her. When they switched off their motors it was utterly silent in the woods. Lundin didn’t quite know what to say. At last he managed to speak.

“Well, how about that? We’ve been looking for you for a while, Salander. Sonny, meet Fröken Salander.”

He smiled. Salander regarded Lundin with expressionless eyes. She noticed that he still had a bright red, newly healed welt on his cheek and jaw where she had cut him with her keys. She raised her eyes and looked at the treetops behind him. Then she lowered them again. Her eyes were disconcertingly coal black.

“I’ve had a fucking miserable week and I’m in a fucking bad mood,” she said. “You know what the worst thing is? Every time I turn around there’s some fucking pile of shit with a beer belly in my way acting tough. Now I’d like to leave. So move your ass.”

Lundin’s mouth was hanging open. He thought he had heard wrong. Then he started laughing involuntarily. The situation was ridiculous. There stood a skinny girl who could fit into his breast pocket getting cheeky with two fully grown men with leather vests that showed they belonged to Svavelsjö MC, which meant they were the most dangerous of bikers and would soon be members of Hell’s Angels. They could tear her apart and stuff her in their saddlebags.

Even if the girl was as nutty as a fruitcake – which she obviously was, according to the newspapers and what he had just seen of her here – their emblem still ought to command respect. And she didn’t show the smallest sign of that. This sort of behaviour could not be tolerated, no matter how ridiculous the situation. He glanced at Nieminen.

“I think the dyke needs some cock, Sonny,” he said, climbing off the Harley and setting his kickstand. He took two slow steps towards Salander and looked down at her. She did not shift an inch. Lundin shook his head and sighed. Then he lashed out a backhand with the same considerable power with which he had struck Blomkvist on Lundagatan.

He met nothing but thin air. At the instant his hand should have hit her face, she took one step back and stood there just out of his reach.

Nieminen was leaning on the handlebars of his Harley and watching his fellow club member with amusement. Lundin was red in the face and took another couple of swings at her. She backed up again. Lundin swung faster.

Salander stopped abruptly and emptied half the contents of a Mace canister in his face. His eyes burned like fire. The toe of her boot shot up with full force and was transformed into kinetic energy in his crotch with a pressure of about 1,700 pounds per square inch. Lundin dropped gasping to his knees and stayed there at a more comfortable height for Salander. She kicked him in the face, deliberately, as if she were taking a penalty in soccer. There was an ugly crunching sound before Lundin toppled over like a sack of potatoes.

It took a few seconds for Nieminen to realize that something unbelievable had happened before his eyes. He tried to set the kickstand of his Harley, missed, and had to look down. Then he decided to play it safe and started groping for the pistol he had in his vest’s inside pocket. As he was pulling down the zipper he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye.

When he looked up he saw Salander coming at him like a cannonball. She jumped with both feet and kicked him full force in the hip, which didn’t injure him but was hard enough to knock over both him and his motorcycle. He narrowly missed having his leg pinned under the bike and stumbled a few paces backwards before he regained his balance.

When he had her in view again he saw her arm move, and a stone as big as his fist flew through the air. He ducked and it missed his head by about an inch.

He finally got out his pistol and tried to flick off the safety, but when he looked up again Salander was upon him. He saw evil in her eyes and felt for the first time a shocked terror.

“Goodnight,” Salander said.

She shoved the Taser into his crotch and fired off 50,000 volts, holding the electrodes against him for at least twenty seconds. Nieminen was transformed into a vegetable.

Salander heard a noise behind her and spun around to see Lundin laboriously getting to his knees. She looked at him with raised eyebrows. He was fumbling blindly through the burning fog of the Mace.

“I’m going to kill you!” he roared.

He was groping around, trying to locate Salander. She watched him circumspectly. Then he said:

“Fucking whore.”

Salander bent down and picked up Nieminen’s pistol, noticing that it was a Polish P-83 Wanad.

She opened the magazine and checked that it was loaded with the correct 9 mm Makarov. She cocked it. She stepped over Nieminen and went across to Lundin, took aim with both hands, and shot him in the foot. He shrieked in shock and collapsed again.

She wondered if she should bother asking about the identity of the hulk she had seen him with at Blomberg’s Café. According to Sandström, the man had murdered someone in a warehouse with Lundin’s help. Hmm. She should have waited to fire the pistol until she had asked her questions.

Lundin did not seem to be in any condition now to carry on a lucid conversation, and there was the possibility that someone had heard the shot. So she ought to leave the area right away. She could always find Lundin at some later date and ask him the question under less stressful circumstances. She secured the weapon’s safety, zipped it into her jacket pocket, and picked up her backpack.

She had gone about ten yards down the road when she stopped and turned around. She walked back slowly and studied Lundin’s motorcycle.

“Harley-Davidson,” she said. “Sweet.”

CHAPTER 27

It was a beautiful spring day as Blomkvist drove Berger’s car south towards Nynäsvägen. Already there was a hint of green in the black fields, and there was real warmth in the air. It was perfect weather to forget all his problems and drive out for a few days to be at peace in his cabin in Sandhamn.

He had agreed with Björck that he would be there at 1:00, but he arrived early and stopped in Dalarö to have coffee and read the papers. He did not prepare for the meeting. Björck had something to tell him, and Blomkvist was determined that this time he would come away from Smådalarö with concrete information about Zala.

Björck met him in the driveway. He looked more self-assured, more pleased with himself than he had two days before. What sort of move are you planning? Blomkvist did not shake hands with him.

“I can give you information about Zala,” Björck said, “but I have certain conditions.”

“Let’s hear them.”

“I won’t be named in Millennium’s exposé.”

“Agreed.”

Björck looked surprised. Blomkvist had accepted straight off, without argument, the point about which Björck was expecting to have a long negotiation. That was his only card. Information about the murders in exchange for anonymity. Blomkvist had agreed, and given up the chance of a strong headline in the magazine.

“I’m serious,” Björck said. “And I want it in writing.”

“You can have it in writing, but a document like that wouldn’t be of any use to you. You’ve committed a crime that I know about and which I’m bound to report to the police. But you know things, and you’re using your position to buy my silence. I’ve thought about the matter and I accept. I won’t mention your name in Millennium. Either you take my word for it or you don’t.”

While Björck thought about it, Blomkvist said: “I have some conditions too. The price of my silence is that you tell me everything you know. If I discover that you’re hiding something, our agreement is void, and I’ll hang your name out to dry on every single news headline in Sweden, just as I did with Wennerström.”

Björck shuddered at the memory.

“OK,” he said. “I don’t have a choice. I’ll tell you who Zala is. But I’m going to need absolute confidentiality.”

He reached out his hand. Blomkvist grasped it. He had just promised to assist in covering up a crime, but it didn’t trouble him for a moment. All he had promised was that he himself and Millennium magazine would not write about Björck. Svensson had already written the whole story in his book. And the book would be published.

The call came through to the police in Strängnäs at 3:18 p.m. It came directly to the switchboard and not through the emergency services. A man named Öberg, owner of a summer cabin just east of Stallarholmen, reported that he had heard what sounded like a shot and went to see what was going on. He had found two severely wounded men. Well, one of the men may not have been so severely wounded, but he was in a lot of pain. And the cabin they were lying in front of was owned by Nils Bjurman, a lawyer. The late Nils Bjurman, that is – the man there was so much about in the papers.

The Strängnäs police had already had an eventful day with an extensive traffic check in the community. During the course of the morning the traffic assignment had been interrupted when a call came in that a middle-aged woman had been killed by her boyfriend at the house they shared in Finninge. At almost the same time a fire had spread from an outhouse into a property in Storgärdet. One body was found in the wreckage. And to top it all off, two cars had collided head-on on the Enköping highway. Accordingly, the Strängnäs police force was busy, almost to a man.

The duty officer, however, had been following the developments in Nykvarn that morning, and she deduced that this new commotion must have something to do with that Lisbeth Salander everyone was talking about. Not least since Nils Bjurman was a part of the investigation. She took action on three fronts. She requisitioned the only remaining police van and drove directly to Stallarholmen. She called her colleagues in Södertälje and asked for assistance. The Södertälje force was also spread thin since part of their manpower had been sent to dig up bodies around a burned-out warehouse south of Nykvarn, but the possible connection between Nykvarn and Stallarholmen prompted another duty officer in Södertälje to dispatch two cruisers to Stallarholmen to assist. In the end the duty officer from Strängnäs called Inspector Bublanski in Stockholm. She reached him on his mobile.

Bublanski was at Milton Security in a meeting with its CEO, Armansky, and two of his staff, Fräklund and Bohman. Hedström was conspicuous by his absence.

Bublanski immediately sent Andersson out to Bjurman’s summer cabin and told him to take Faste if he could get hold of him. After thinking for a moment, Bublanski also called Holmberg, who was near Nykvarn and therefore considerably closer to Stallarholmen.

Holmberg had some news for him too. “We’ve identified the body in the pit.”

“That’s impossible. How so fast?”

“Everything’s simple when the corpse considerately has himself buried with his wallet and laminated ID.”

“Who is it?”

“A bit of a celebrity. Kenneth Gustafsson, known as the Vagabond. Does it ring a bell?”

“Are you kidding? Downtown hooligan, pusher, petty thief, and addict? He’s lying in a hole in Nykvarn?”

“Yes, that’s the man. At least that’s the ID in the wallet. Identification will have to be confirmed by forensics, and it’s going to be like putting a puzzle together. The Vagabond was chopped into five or six pieces.”

“Interesting. Paolo Roberto said that the super heavyweight he was fighting threatened Miriam Wu with a chain saw.”

“Could very well have been a chain saw, but I haven’t looked that closely. We’ve just started digging up the second site. They’re busy setting up the tent.”

“That’s good. Jerker – it’s been a long day, I know, but can you stay on this evening?”

“Sure, OK. I’ll let them get on with it here and head on to Stallarholmen.”

Bublanski disconnected and rubbed his eyes.

The armed response team hastily assembled from Strängnäs arrived at Bjurman’s summer cabin at 3:44 p.m. On the access road they literally collided with a man on a Harley-Davidson, who was wobbling along until he steered right into the oncoming van. It was not a serious collision. The police climbed out and identified Sonny Nieminen, thirty-seven years old and a known killer from the mid-nineties. Nieminen seemed to be in bad shape. When they put the cuffs on him, they were surprised to find that the back of his vest was slashed. A piece of leather about eight inches square was missing. It looked peculiar. Nieminen was unwilling to discuss the matter.

They locked him in the van and drove on two hundred yards to the cabin. They found a retired harbour worker by the name of Öberg putting a splint on the foot of one Carl-Magnus Lundin, thirty-six years old and president of the gang that called itself Svavelsjö MC.

The leader of the police team was Inspector Nils-Henrik Johansson. He climbed out, straightened his shoulder belt, and looked at the sorry creature on the ground.

Öberg stopped bandaging Lundin’s foot and gave Johansson a wry look.

“I’m the one who called.”

“You reported shots being fired.”

“I reported that I heard a single shot and came over to investigate and found these guys. This one has been shot in the foot and beaten up pretty badly. I think he needs an ambulance.”

Öberg glanced towards the police van.

“I see you got the other guy. He was out cold when I arrived, but he didn’t seem to be wounded. He came to after a while, but he didn’t stick around to help his buddy.”

Holmberg arrived at the same time as the police from Södertälje, just as the ambulance was driving away. He was given a brief rundown of the team’s observations. Neither Lundin nor Nieminen had been willing to explain how he came to be there. Lundin was hardly in any condition to talk at all.

“So – two bikers in leathers, one Harley-Davidson, one gunshot victim, and no weapon. Have I got it right?” Holmberg said.

Johansson nodded.

“Should we discount that one of these macho heroes rode bitch?”

“I think that would be considered unmanly in their circles,” Johansson said.

“In that case, we’re missing one motorcycle. Since the weapon is missing too, we may conclude that a third party has left the scene with one motorcycle and one weapon.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“And it creates a conundrum. If these two gentlemen from Svavelsjö came on motorcycles, we’re also missing the vehicle in which the third party arrived. The third party couldn’t have taken both his own vehicle and the bike. And it’s a pretty long walk from the Strängnäs highway.”

“Unless the third party was living in the cabin.”

“Hmm,” Holmberg said. “But the cabin is owned by the deceased Advokat Bjurman, and he definitely no longer lives here.”

“Maybe there was a fourth party who left in a car.”

“Then why wouldn’t the two have gone in the car together? I’m assuming that this story isn’t about the theft of a Harley, no matter how desirable they are.”

He thought for a moment and then asked the team to assign two uniforms to look for an abandoned vehicle on the forest roads nearby and to knock on doors in the area to ask if anyone had seen anything unusual.

“There aren’t that many cabins inhabited at this time of year,” the team leader said, but he promised to do his best.

Holmberg opened the unlocked door to the cabin. He straightaway found the box of files on the kitchen table with Bjurman’s reports about Salander. He sat down and began paging through them, his astonishment growing.

Holmberg’s team was in luck. Just half an hour after they began knocking on doors among the intermittently populated cabins, they found Anna Viktoria Hansson. She had spent the spring morning clearing up a garden near the access road to the summer-cabin area. Yes indeed, she might be seventy-two, but she had good eyesight. Yes indeed, she had seen a short girl in a dark jacket walk past around lunchtime. At three in the afternoon two men on motorcycles had driven by. They made an appalling racket. And shortly after that, the girl had gone back the other way on one of the motorcycles, or maybe on a different one altogether. Well, it looked like the girl, but in the helmet she could not be 100 percent certain. And then the police cars started arriving.

Just as Holmberg was getting this statement, Andersson arrived at the cabin.

“What’s happening here?” he said.

Holmberg looked glumly at his colleague. “I don’t quite know how to explain this to you,” he said.

“Jerker, are you trying to tell me that Salander turned up at Bjurman’s cabin and all by herself beat the shit out of the top echelon of the Svavelsjö MC?” Bublanski sounded tense.

“Well, she was trained by Paolo Roberto.”

“Jerker, please. Give me a break.”

“OK, listen to this. Magnus Lundin has a bullet wound in his foot. Which is going to do him permanent damage. The bullet went out the back of his heel, blew his boot to kingdom come.”

“At least she didn’t shoot him in the head.”

“Apparently that wasn’t necessary. According to the local team, Lundin has serious injuries to his face: a broken jaw and two teeth knocked out. The medics suspected a concussion. Besides the gunshot wound to his foot, he also has a massive pain in his abdomen.”

“How’s Nieminen doing?”

“He seems unhurt. But according to the old man who called in, he was unconscious when he arrived. Nieminen came to after a while and was trying to leave just as the Strängnäs team got there.”

Bublanski was speechless.

“There’s one mysterious detail,” Holmberg said.

“Another one?”

“Nieminen’s leather vest… He came here on his bike.”

“Yes?”

“It was ripped.”

“What do you mean, ripped?”

“There’s a chunk missing. About eight by eight inches cut out of the back of it. Just where Svavelsjö MC has its insignia.”

Bublanski raised his eyebrows. “Why would Salander cut a square out of his vest? For a trophy? For revenge? But revenge for what?”

“No idea. But I thought of one other thing,” Holmberg said. “Magnus Lundin is a hefty guy with a ponytail. One of the guys who kidnapped Salander’s girlfriend had a beer belly and a ponytail.”

Salander had not had such a rush since she visited Gröna Lund amusement park several years before and rode on the Freefall. She went on it three times and could have gone another three if she had had the money.

It was one thing to ride a 125cc lightweight Kawasaki, which was really no more than a heavily souped-up moped, but it was something else entirely to maintain control of a 1450cc Harley-Davidson. Her first three hundred yards on Bjurman’s badly maintained forest track was a regular roller coaster, and she felt like a living gyro. Twice she almost rode into the woods before at the last second she managed to regain control of the hog.

The helmet kept slipping down and masking her vision, even though she had put in some extra stuffing using a piece of leather she’d cut out of Nieminen’s padded vest.

She did not dare stop to adjust the helmet for fear she would not be able to manage the bike’s weight. She was too short to reach the ground with both feet and was afraid the Harley would tip over. If that happened, she would never be able to get it upright again.

Things went more smoothly once she got on the wider gravel road leading to the summer-cabin area. When she turned onto the Strängnäs highway a few minutes later, she risked taking one hand off the handlebars to set the helmet right. Then she gave the bike some gas. She covered the distance to Södertälje in record time, smiling in delight the whole way. Just before she reached Södertälje, two blue-and-yellow police Volvos with their sirens on flew by in the other direction.

The sensible course would be to dump the Harley in Södertälje and let Irene Nesser take the shuttle train into Stockholm, but Salander couldn’t resist the temptation. She turned onto the E4 and accelerated. She did not go over the speed limit – well, not much anyway – but it still felt as though she were in freefall. Not until she reached Älvsjö did she turn off and find her way to the fairground, where she managed to park the beast without tipping it over. She was very sad to leave the bike behind, along with the helmet and the piece of leather from Nieminen’s vest. She walked to the shuttle train. She was seriously chilled. She rode the one stop to Södra station, then walked home to Mosebacke and ran herself a hot bath.

“His name is Alexander Zalachenko,” Björck said. “But officially he doesn’t exist. You won’t find him on the national register.”

Zala. Alexander Zalachenko. Finally a name.

“Who is he and how can I find him?”

“He’s not someone you’d want to find.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“What I’m going to tell you is top secret information. If it came out that I told you this, I’d be sent to prison. It’s one of the most deeply buried secrets we have within the Swedish defence system. You have to understand why it’s so important that you guarantee my anonymity.”

“I’ve already done that,” Blomkvist said impatiently.

“Alexander Zalachenko was born in 1940 in Stalingrad. When he was a year old, the German offensive on the eastern front began. Both of Zalachenko’s parents died in the war. At least that’s what Zalachenko thinks. He doesn’t really know what happened during the war. His earliest memories are of an orphanage in the Ural Mountains.”

Blomkvist made swift notes.

“The orphanage was in a garrison town and was, as it were, sponsored by the Red Army. You might say that Zalachenko got a military education very early. Since the end of the Soviet Union, documents have emerged which show there were experiments to create a cadre of particularly athletic, elite soldiers among the orphans who were being raised by the state. Zalachenko was one of them. To make a long story short, when he was five he was put in an army school. It turned out that he was talented. When he was fifteen, in 1955, he was sent to a military school in Novosibirsk, where together with two thousand other pupils he underwent training similar to Spetsnaz, the Russian elite troops.”

“OK, let’s get to the adult stuff.”

“In 1958, when he was eighteen, he was moved to Minsk, to specialist training with the GRU-Glavnoye razvedyvatelnoye upravlenie, the military intelligence service that is directly subordinate to the army high command, not to be confused with the KGB, the civil secret police. The GRU usually took care of espionage and foreign operations. When he was twenty, Zalachenko was sent to Cuba. It was a training period and he was still only the equivalent of a second lieutenant. But he was there for two years, during the Cuban missile crisis and the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. In 1963 he went back to Minsk for further training. Thereafter he was stationed first in Bulgaria and then in Hungary. In 1965 he was promoted to lieutenant and got his first posting to Western Europe, in Rome, where he served for a year. That was his first undercover assignment. He was a civilian with a fake passport, obviously, and with no contact with the embassy.”

Blomkvist nodded as he wrote. Against his will he was starting to get interested.

“In 1967 he was moved to London. There he organized the execution of a defected KGB agent. Over the next ten years he became one of the GRU’s top agents. He belonged to the real elite of devoted political soldiers. He speaks six languages fluently. He’s worked as a journalist, a photographer, in advertising, as a sailor – you name it. He’s a survival artist, an expert in disguise and deception. He commanded his own agents and organized or carried out his own operations. Several of these operations were contracts for hits, and a large number of them took place in the third world, but he was also involved in extortion, intimidation, and all kinds of other assignments that his superiors needed him to perform. In 1969 he was promoted to captain, in 1972 to major, and in 1975 to lieutenant colonel.”

“Why did he come to Sweden?”

“I’m getting to that. Over the years he became corrupt, and he squirrelled away a little money here and there. He drank too much and did too much womanizing. All this was noted by his superiors, but he was still a favourite and they could overlook the small stuff. In 1976 he was sent to Spain on a mission. We don’t need to go into the details, but he made a fool of himself. The mission failed and all of a sudden he was in disgrace and called back to Russia. He chose to ignore the order and thereby ended up in an even worse situation. The GRU ordered a military attaché at the embassy in Madrid to find him and talk some sense into him. Something went wrong, and Zalachenko killed the man. Now he had no choice. He had burned his bridges and rashly decided to defect. He laid a trail that seemed to lead from Spain to Portugal and possibly to a boating accident. He also left clues indicating he intended to flee to the United States. He chose in fact to defect to the most improbable country in Europe. He came to Sweden, where he contacted the Security Police, Säpo, and sought asylum. This was well thought out, because the probability that a death squad from the KGB or the GRU would look for him here was almost zero.”

Björck fell silent.

“And?”

“What’s the government supposed to do if one of the Soviet Union’s top spies defects and seeks asylum in Sweden? A conservative government was coming into power. As a matter of fact, it was one of the very first matters we had to take to the newly appointed foreign minister. Those political cowards tried to get rid of him like a hot potato, of course, but they couldn’t just send him back to the Soviets – that would have been a scandal of unmatched proportions if it ever came out. Instead they tried to send him to the States or to England. Zalachenko refused. He didn’t like America and he knew that England was one of those countries where the Soviets had agents at the highest levels within military intelligence. He didn’t want to go to Israel, because he didn’t like Jews. So he decided to make his home in Sweden.”

The whole thing sounded so improbable that it occurred to Blomkvist that Björck might be pulling his leg.

“So he stayed in Sweden?”

“Exactly. For many years it was one of the country’s best-kept military secrets. The thing was, we got plenty of good information out of Zalachenko. For a time during the late seventies and early eighties, he was the jewel in the crown among defectors, the most senior from one of the GRU’s elite commands.”

“So he could sell information?”

“Precisely. He played his cards well and doled out information when it suited him best. We were able to identify an agent at NATO headquarters in Brussels. An agent in Rome. A contact for a whole ring of spies in Berlin. The identity of hit men he’d used in Ankara and Athens. He didn’t know that much about Sweden, but the information he did have we could pass on in return for favours. He was a gold mine.”

“So you started cooperating with him.”

“We gave him a new identity, a passport, a little money, and he took care of himself. That was what he was trained to do.”

Blomkvist sat for a while in silence, digesting this information. Then he looked up at Björck.

“You lied to me the last time I was here.”

“I did?”

“You said that you met Bjurman at your police shooting club in the eighties. But you met him long before that.”

“It was an automatic reaction. It’s confidential, and I had no reason to go into how Bjurman and I met. It wasn’t until you asked about Zala that I made the connection.”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I was thirty-three and had been working at Säpo for three years. Bjurman was a good deal younger and had just finished his degree. He was handling certain legal matters at Säpo. It was a kind of trainee job. Bjurman was from Karlskrona, and his father worked in military intelligence.”

“And?”

“Neither Bjurman nor I was remotely qualified to handle someone like Zalachenko, but he made contact on election day in 1976. There was hardly a soul in police headquarters – everyone was either off that day or working on stakeouts and the like. Zalachenko chose that moment to walk into Norrmalm police station and declare that he was seeking political asylum and wanted to talk to somebody in the Security Police. He didn’t give his name. I was on duty and thought it was a straightforward refugee case, so I took Bjurman with me as legal advisor.”

Björck rubbed his eyes.

“There he sat and told us calmly and matter-of-factly who he was, and what he had worked on. Bjurman took notes. After a while I realized what I was dealing with. I stopped the conversation and got Zalachenko and Bjurman the hell out of that police station. I didn’t know what to do, so I booked a room at the Hotel Continental right across from Central Station and stowed him there. I told Bjurman to babysit him while I went downstairs and called my superior.” He laughed. “I’ve often thought that we behaved like total amateurs. But that’s how it happened.”

“Who was your boss?”

“That’s not relevant. I’m not going to name anyone else.”

Blomkvist shrugged and let the matter drop.

“He made it very clear that this was a matter that required the greatest possible discretion and that we should get as few people involved as possible. Bjurman should never have had anything to do with it – it was way above his level – but since he already knew what was going on it was better to keep him on rather than bring in somebody new. I assume that the same reasoning applied to a junior officer like myself. There came to be a total of seven people associated with the Security Police who knew of Zalachenko’s existence.”

“How many others know this story?”

“From 1976 up to the beginning of 1990… all in all about twenty people in the government, military high command, and within Säpo.”

“And after the beginning of 1990?”

Björck shrugged. “The moment the Soviet Union collapsed he became uninteresting.”

“But what happened after Zalachenko came to Sweden?”

Björck said nothing for so long that Blomkvist began to get restless.

“To be honest… Zalachenko was a big success, and those of us who were involved built our careers on it. Don’t misunderstand me, it was also a full-time job. I was assigned to be Zalachenko’s mentor in Sweden, and over the first ten years we met at least a couple of times a week. This was all during the important years when he was full of fresh information. But it was just as much about keeping him under control.”

“In what sense?”

“Zalachenko was a sly devil. He could be incredibly charming, but he could also be paranoid and crazy. He would go on drinking binges and then turn violent. More than once I had to go out at night and sort out some mess he’d gotten himself into.”

“For instance…”

“For instance, the time he went to a bar and got into an argument and beat the living daylights out of two bouncers who tried to calm him down. He was quite a small man, but exceptionally skilled at close combat, which regrettably he chose to demonstrate on various occasions. Once I had to pick him up at a police station.”

“He risked attracting serious attention to himself. That doesn’t sound very professional.”

“That was the way he was. He hadn’t committed any crime in Sweden and was never arrested. We had provided him with a Swedish name, a Swedish passport and ID. And he had a house that the Security Police paid for. He received a salary from Säpo just to keep him available. But we couldn’t prevent him from going to bars or from womanizing. All we could do was clean up after him. That was my job until 1985 when I got a new post and my successor took over as Zalachenko’s handler.”

“And Bjurman’s role?”

“To be honest, Bjurman was deadweight. He wasn’t particularly clever. In fact he was the wrong man in the wrong job. It was pure chance that he was part of the whole Zalachenko business at all, and he was only involved in the very early days and on the occasions when we needed him to deal with legal formalities. My superior solved the problem with Bjurman.”

“How?”

“The easiest possible way. He was given a job outside the police force at a law firm that had, as you might say, close ties to us.”

“Klang and Reine.”

Björck gave Mikael a sharp look.

“Yes. Over the years he always had assignments, minor investigations, from Säpo. So in a way he too built his career on Zalachenko.”

“Where is Zalachenko today?”

“I really don’t know. My contact with him dried up after 1985, and I haven’t seen him in over twelve years. The last I heard, he left Sweden in 1992.”

“Apparently he’s back. He’s cropped up in connection with weapons, drugs, and sex trafficking.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Björck said. “But we can’t know for sure if it’s the Zala you’re looking for or somebody else.”

“The likelihood of two separate Zalachenkos appearing in this story must be microscopic. What was his Swedish name?”

“I’m not going to reveal that.”

“Now you’re being evasive.”

“You wanted to know who Zala was. I’ve told you. But I won’t give you the last piece of the puzzle before I know you’ve kept your side of the bargain.”

“Zala has probably committed three murders and the police are looking for the wrong person. If you think I’ll be satisfied without his name, you’re mistaken.”

“What makes you think Lisbeth Salander isn’t the murderer?”

“I know.”

Björck smiled at Blomkvist. He suddenly felt much safer.

“I think Zala is the killer,” Blomkvist said.

“Wrong. Zala hasn’t shot anyone.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because Zala is sixty-plus years old now and severely disabled. He’s had a foot amputated and doesn’t do much walking. So he hasn’t been running around Odenplan and Enskede shooting people. If he was going to murder somebody, he’d have to call the disabled transport service.”

Eriksson smiled politely at Modig. “You’ll have to ask Mikael about that.”

“OK, I will.”

“I can’t discuss his research with you.”

“And if this Zala is a potential suspect…”

“You’ll have to discuss that with Mikael,” Eriksson said. “I can help you with what Dag was working on, but I can’t tell you about our own research.”

Modig sighed. “What can you tell me about the people on this list?”

“Only what Dag wrote, nothing about the sources. But I can say that Mikael has crossed about a dozen people off this list so far. That might help.”

No, that won’t help. The police will have to do their own formal interviews. A judge. Two lawyers. Several politicians and journalists… and police colleagues. A real merry-go-round. Modig knew that they should have started doing this the day after the murders.

Her eyes lighted on one name on the list. Gunnar Björck.

“There’s no address for this man.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“He works for the Security Police. His address is unlisted. Actually he’s on sick leave. Dag was never able to track him down.”

“And have you?” Modig said with a smile.

“Ask Mikael.”

Modig stared at the wall above Svensson’s desk. She was thinking. “May I ask a personal question?”

“Go right ahead.”

“Who do you think murdered your friends and the lawyer?”

Eriksson wished Blomkvist were here to handle these questions. It was uncomfortable to be quizzed by a police officer. It was even more unpleasant not to be able to explain exactly what conclusions Millennium had reached. Then she heard Berger’s voice behind her back.

“Our theory is that the murders were committed to prevent some part of Dag’s exposé from reaching the light of day. But we don’t know who the killer was. Mikael is focusing on someone who goes by the name of Zala.”

Modig turned to look at Millennium’s editor in chief. Berger held out two mugs of coffee. They were decorated with the logos of the civil service union HTF and the Christian Democratic Party, respectively. Berger smiled sweetly and went back to her office.

She came out again three minutes later.

“Inspector Modig, your boss has just called. Your mobile is off. He wants you to call him.”

An APB was sent out to say that Lisbeth Salander had at last surfaced. The bulletin indicated that she was probably riding a Harley-Davidson and contained the warning that she was armed and had shot someone at a summer cabin in the vicinity of Stallarholmen.

The police set up roadblocks on routes into Strängnäs, Mariefred, and Södertälje. Every commuter train between Södertälje and Stockholm was searched that evening. But no-one answering to Salander’s description was found.

At around 7:00 p.m. a police patrol found the Harley-Davidson outside the fairground in Älvsjö, and that shifted the focus of the search from Södertälje to Stockholm. The report from Älvsjö said that part of a leather jacket with the insignia of Svavelsjö MC had also been found. News of the find made Inspector Bublanski push his glasses up on his head and peer glumly at the darkness outside his office on Kungsholmen.

The day’s developments had led to nothing but bafflement. The kidnapping of Salander’s girlfriend, the inexplicable involvement of the boxer Paolo Roberto, the arson near Södertälje, and bodies buried in the woods there. And finally this bizarre business in Stallarholmen.

Bublanski went out to the main office and looked at the map of Stockholm and its environs. He found Stallarholmen, Nykvarn, Svavelsjö, and finally Älvsjö, the four places that for apparently different reasons were of current interest. He moved his gaze to Enskede and sighed. He had the unpleasant feeling that the police investigation was many miles behind the unfolding events. Whatever the Enskede murders had been about, it was much more complicated than they had supposed.

Blomkvist was unaware of the drama at Stallarholmen. He left Smådalarö around 3:00 in the afternoon. He stopped at a gas station and had some coffee as he tried to make sense of what he had discovered.

He was surprised that Björck had given him so many details, but the man had absolutely refused to give him the last piece of the puzzle: Zalachenko’s Swedish identity.

“We had a deal,” Blomkvist said.

“And I’ve fulfilled my part of it. I’ve told you who Zalachenko is. If you want more than that we’ll have to make a new agreement. I’ll need guarantees that my name will be taken out of all your research material. And I’ll need guarantees that you won’t write about me at all in connection with the Zalachenko story.”

Blomkvist was willing to go so far as to treat Björck as an anonymous source in connection with the background story, but he could not guarantee that Björck would not be identified by anyone else – the police, for example.

“I’m not worried about the police,” Björck said.

They agreed in the end to think about everything for a day or so before resuming their conversation.

As Blomkvist sat drinking his coffee, he felt that there was something right in front of his nose that he wasn’t seeing. He was so close that he could sense shapes, but he couldn’t bring the picture into focus. Then it came to him that there was another person who might be able to shed some light on the story. He was quite close to the rehabilitation home in Ersta. He checked his watch. He would go to see Holger Palmgren.

After the meeting Björck was exhausted. His back hurt worse than ever. He took three painkillers and had to stretch out on the sofa in the living room. Thoughts were churning around in his head. After about an hour he got up and boiled some water and took out a Lipton’s tea bag. He sat at the kitchen table and brooded.

Could he trust Blomkvist? He was now at the man’s mercy. But he had held back the crucial information: Zala’s identity and his role in the whole drama.

How the hell had he landed in this mess? All he did was pay some whores. He was a bachelor. That sixteen-year-old bitch hadn’t even pretended that she liked him. He had felt her disgust.

Fucking cunt. If she hadn’t been so young. If she’d been at least twenty it wouldn’t have looked so bad. Blomkvist detested him too, and made no effort to hide it.

Zalachenko.

A pimp. What irony. He had fucked Zalachenko’s whores. But Zalachenko had been smart enough to stay in the background.

Bjurman and Salander.

And Blomkvist.

A way out.

After an hour of worrying he went to his study and found the piece of paper with the telephone number he had retrieved from his office earlier in the week. It wasn’t the only thing he’d kept from Blomkvist. He knew exactly where Zalachenko was, though he hadn’t spoken to him in more than twelve years. Nor had he any desire to do so ever again.

But Zalachenko was a sly devil. He would understand the problem. He would be able to vanish from the face of the earth. Go abroad and retire. The real catastrophe would be if he were actually caught. Then everything would come crashing down.

He hesitated a long time before he dialled the number.

“Hello. It’s Sven Jansson,” he said. A name that he had not used in a very long time. Zalachenko remembered instantly who he was.

CHAPTER 28

Bublanski met Modig for coffee and a bite to eat at Wayne’s on Vasagatan at 8:00 in the evening. She had never seen her boss so downcast before. He told her everything that had happened that day. Finally she reached out and put her hand over his. It was the first time she had ever touched Bublanski, and there was no other reason than companionship. He smiled sadly and patted her hand in an equally friendly way.

“Maybe I should retire,” he said.

She smiled at him indulgently.

“This investigation is falling apart,” he went on. “It’s already in pieces. I informed Ekström of everything that occurred today, and he just said, ‘Do what you think is best.’ He seems incapable of action.”

“I don’t want to bad-mouth a superior, but as far as I’m concerned, Ekström can go jump in the lake.”

Bublanski nodded. “You’re officially back on the case, but don’t expect he’ll come up with an apology. Also, Faste stormed out this morning and has had his mobile switched off all day. If he doesn’t turn up tomorrow I’m going to have to get somebody to look for him.”

“Faste can stay out of it too. What’s happening with Hedström?”

“Nothing. I wanted to have him charged, but Ekström doesn’t dare. We kicked him out and I had a serious talk with Armansky. We broke off working with Milton, which unfortunately means that we’ve lost Sonny Bohman too. Which is a shame. He was a talented detective.”

“How did Armansky take it?”

“He was crushed. The curious thing is that…”

“What?”

“He said that Salander never liked Hedström. He remembered she told him a couple of years ago that Hedström should be fired. She said he was a shithead, but apparently wouldn’t explain why. Armansky of course didn’t do as she suggested.”

“Interesting.”

“Curt is still down in Södertälje. They’re about to do a search of Carl-Magnus Lundin’s place. Jerker is fully occupied digging up bits of Kenneth ‘the Vagabond’ Gustafsson. And just before I got here he called to say that there’s another body in the second grave. From the clothes it’s probably a woman. Seems to have been there quite a while.”

“A woodland cemetery. Jan, I assume Salander is not a suspect in the murders at Nykvarn.”

Bublanski smiled for the first time in hours. “No. She had to be crossed off that one. But she’s definitely carrying a weapon and she did shoot Lundin.”

“Mind you, she shot him in the foot, not in the head. In Lundin’s case there’s probably not much difference, but don’t forget that whoever committed the murders in Enskede is an excellent shot.”

“Sonja… this is totally absurd. Magge Lundin and Sonny Nieminen are two hooligans with long police records. Lundin may have put on a pound or two and he may not be in top form, but he’s still dangerous. And Nieminen is a brutal bastard that even the tough guys are afraid of. I simply can’t imagine how a skinny little creature like Salander could beat the shit out of them like that. Not that he doesn’t deserve a beating, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I don’t understand how it could have happened.”

“We’ll have to ask her when we find her. She has been documented as violent, after all.”

“Even Curt would have thought twice about taking those guys on. And Curt isn’t exactly a pansy.”

“The question is whether she had some reason to attack Lundin and Nieminen.”

“One little girl with two psychopaths in a deserted summer cabin? I can think of a reason or two,” Bublanski said.

“Could she have had help from someone? Could there have been other people involved?”

“There’s nothing in the report to indicate that. Salander was inside the cabin. There was a coffee cup on the table. And besides, we have a statement from Anna Viktoria Hansson, who keeps an eye on everyone’s movements. She swears that the only people who passed her were Salander and our two heroes from Svavelsjö.”

“How did Salander get into the cabin?”

“With a key. I’m guessing she took it from Bjurman’s apartment. You remember –”

“The cut police tape. She’s been busy.”

Modig drummed her fingertips on the table and then took a new approach.

“Has it been confirmed that it was Lundin who had a part in the kidnapping of Miriam Wu?”

“Paolo Roberto looked through mug shots of three dozen bikers. He picked him out right away, no shadow of a doubt that was the man he saw at the warehouse in Nykvarn.”

“And Blomkvist?”

“I haven’t gotten hold of him yet. He’s not answering his mobile.”

“But Lundin matches his description of Salander’s attacker on Lundagatan. So we can assume that Svavelsjö MC has been hunting Salander for a while. Why?”

Bublanski threw up his hands.

Modig asked, “Was Salander living in Bjurman’s summer cabin all the time we were looking for her?”

“I thought of that too. But Jerker doesn’t think so. The cabin doesn’t look as if it’s been lived in recently, and we have a witness who says she arrived on foot earlier today.”

“Why did she go there? I don’t suppose she’d set up a meeting with Lundin.”

“Hardly. She must have been looking for something. And the only thing we found was a bunch of files that seem to contain Bjurman’s own investigation of Salander. It’s all the material about her from social welfare, the Guardianship Agency, and old school reports. But it seems that some of the folders are missing. They were numbered. We have folders 1, 4, and 5.”

“So 2 and 3 are missing.”

“And maybe more with higher numbers.”

“Which raises a question. Why would Salander be looking for information about herself?” Modig said.

“I can think of two reasons. Either she wants to hide something that she knew Bjurman had written about her, or else she wants to find out something. But there’s another question too.”

“What’s that?”

“Why would Bjurman compile an extensive report on her and then hide it in his summer cabin? Salander seems to have found the material in the attic. He was her guardian and was assigned to handle her finances and other matters. But the material there gives the impression that he was almost obsessed with charting her life.”

“Bjurman is looking more and more like a disreputable character. I was thinking about that today when I went through the list of johns at Millennium. I suddenly expected his name to turn up there too.”

“Good thinking. Remember the violent porn you found on his computer. Did you find anything at Millennium?”

“I don’t really know. Blomkvist is busy checking off the names on their list, but according to Malin Eriksson, one of the editors there, he hasn’t turned up anything of interest. Jan… I have to say one thing.”

“What?”

“I don’t think Salander did any of this. Enskede and Odenplan, I mean. I was just as persuaded as all the others when we started, but I don’t believe it now. And I can’t really explain why.”

Bublanski realized that he agreed with Modig.

The giant paced back and forth in Lundin’s house in Svavelsjö. He stopped by the kitchen window and looked down the road. They should have been back by now. He had a sinking feeling in his stomach. Something was wrong.

He didn’t like being alone in this house. He didn’t feel at home here. There was a draft in his room upstairs, and there were always strange noises. He tried to shake off his uneasiness. It was foolish, he knew, but he had never liked being alone. He was not in the least afraid of flesh-and-blood people, but empty houses out in the country he thought were indescribably horrible. The noises got his imagination working. He couldn’t shed the sense that something dark and evil was watching him through the crack in the door. Something he believed he could hear breathing.

When he was younger he’d been troubled by a fear of the dark. That is, he’d been troubled until he had aggressively told off his friends, his own age and sometimes a lot older, who were amused by such weaknesses. He was good at telling people off.

But it was embarrassing. He hated darkness and being alone. He hated the creatures that inhabited darkness and solitude. He wished Lundin would come home. Lundin’s presence would restore the balance, even if they didn’t exchange a word or weren’t even in the same room. He would hear real sounds and he would know that there were people nearby.

He tried to ward off his anxiety by playing CDs on the stereo, and restlessly he tried to find something he wanted to read on Lundin’s shelves. Lundin’s taste in books left much to be desired, and he had to settle for a collection of motorcycle magazines, men’s magazines, and paperback thrillers of the type that had never interested him. The solitude became more and more claustrophobic. He cleaned and oiled the pistol he kept in his bag, and for a while that had a calming effect.

Eventually he had to get out of the house. He walked around the garden to get some fresh air. He stayed out of sight of the neighbouring houses, but stopped so that he could watch the lighted windows where there were people. If he stood quite still he could hear the sound of music in the distance.

When he felt he had to go back inside Lundin’s wooden shack he stood for a long time on the steps before shaking off the oppressive feeling and resolutely going in.

At 7:00 he watched the news on TV4. He listened with horror to the headlines and then to a report on the shoot-out at the summer cabin in Stallarholmen.

He ran up the stairs to his room on the top floor and stuffed his belongings into a bag. Two minutes later he was driving away in his white Volvo.

He had made his escape in the nick of time. Just two miles outside Svavelsjö two police cars with their blue lights flashing passed him, on their way into the village.

After a great deal of patient negotiation Blomkvist was allowed to see Holger Palmgren. He was so insistent that the nurse in charge called Dr. Sivarnandan, who apparently lived nearby. Sivarnandan arrived fifteen minutes later and assumed responsibility for dealing with the stubborn journalist. At first he was not at all sympathetic. Over the past two weeks several reporters had found out where Palmgren was and had used all sorts of strategies to get a statement. Palmgren himself had refused on any account to receive such visitors, and the staff had instructions to let no-one in to see him.

Dr. Sivarnandan had been following the case with much distress. He was shocked at the headlines that Salander had generated in the press. Palmgren had fallen into a deep depression which, Sivarnandan suspected, was a result of his inability to help Salander in any way. Palmgren had broken off his rehabilitation therapy and now spent the days reading newspapers and following the hunt for the girl on TV. Otherwise he sat in his room and brooded.

Blomkvist remained standing at Sivarnandan’s desk and explained that of course he had no wish to subject Palmgren to any unpleasantness. He didn’t want a statement from him. He was a good friend of Salander, he was persuaded of her innocence, and he was desperately searching for information that might shed some light on certain aspects of her past.

Dr. Sivarnandan was hard to convince. Blomkvist had to explain in detail his own role in the drama. Not until half an hour of discussion had passed did Sivarnandan give his consent. He asked Blomkvist to wait while he went up to ask Palmgren whether he would see him.

Sivarnandan returned after ten minutes.

“He’s agreed to see you. If he doesn’t like you then he’ll put you out on your ear. You are not to interview him or write anything in the press about the visit.”

“I won’t write a line about this.”

Palmgren had a small room containing a bed, a bureau, a table, and a couple of chairs. He was white-haired and thin as a scarecrow. He evidently had trouble with his balance, but he stood up anyway when Blomkvist was shown into the room. He did not hold out his hand, but motioned to one of the chairs by the table. Blomkvist sat down. Dr. Sivarnandan remained in the room. Blomkvist had difficulty at first understanding Palmgren’s slurred speech.

“Who are you, claiming to be Lisbeth’s friend, and what do you want?”

“You don’t have to say anything to me. But I ask you to listen to what I have to say before you throw me out.”

Palmgren nodded curtly and shuffled over to the chair opposite Blomkvist.

“I met Lisbeth Salander for the first time two years ago. I hired her to do some research for me. She visited me in another town where I was living at the time, and we worked together for several weeks.”

He wondered how much he had to explain to Palmgren. He decided to stay as close to the truth as possible.

“During that time two important things happened. One was that Lisbeth saved my life. The other was that we became very good friends. I came to know her well and I think very highly of her.”

Without going into detail, Blomkvist told Palmgren how his relationship with her had suddenly ended after the Christmas holiday a year ago, when Salander left the country.

Then he told Palmgren about his work at Millennium and about how Svensson and Johansson were murdered and how he had been drawn into the hunt for the killer.

“I’ve heard that you’ve been bothered by reporters lately, and certainly the papers have published one idiotic story after the other. All I can do now is to assure you that I’m not here to gather material for yet another article. I’m here because of Lisbeth, as her friend. I’m probably one of the few people in the country right now who unhesitatingly, and without an ulterior motive, is on her side. I believe her to be innocent. I believe that a man named Zalachenko is behind the murders.”

Blomkvist paused. Something had glimmered in Palmgren’s eyes when he said the name Zalachenko.

“If you can contribute anything that would shed some light on Lisbeth’s past, this is the time to do it. If you don’t want to help her, then I’m wasting my time and yours and I’ll know where you stand.”

Palmgren had not said a word during this monologue. As Blomkvist finished, his eyes flashed again. But he was smiling. He spoke as clearly as he could.

“You really want to help her.”

Blomkvist nodded.

Palmgren leaned forward. “Describe the sofa in her living room.”

“On the occasions I visited her she had a worn-out, extremely ugly piece of furniture with a certain curiosity value. I would guess it’s from the early fifties. It has two shapeless cushions covered in brown cloth with a yellow pattern of sorts on it. The cloth is torn in several places and the stuffing was coming out when I last saw it.”

All of a sudden Palmgren laughed. It sounded more like he was clearing his throat. He looked at Dr. Sivarnandan.

“He’s been to her apartment at least. Does the doctor think it would be possible to offer my guest a cup of coffee?”

“Certainly.” Dr. Sivarnandan got up to leave. He paused in the doorway to nod at Blomkvist.

“Alexander Zalachenko,” Palmgren said as soon as the door was closed.

“So you know that name?”

“Lisbeth told me the name. And I think it’s important that I tell this story to someone… should I happen to drop dead, which is all too possible.”

“Lisbeth? How would she know anything about his existence?”

“He is Lisbeth’s father.”

At first Blomkvist could not make out what Palmgren was saying. Then the words sank in.

“What the hell are you saying?”

“Zalachenko was some sort of a political refugee – I’ve never gotten the story quite straight, and Lisbeth was always tight-lipped about it. It was something she absolutely did not want to talk about.”

Her birth certificate. Father unknown.

“Zalachenko is Lisbeth’s father,” Blomkvist repeated aloud.

“On only one occasion in all the years I’ve known her did she tell me what happened. Here’s how I understood it – Zalachenko came here in the mid-seventies. He met Lisbeth’s mother in 1977, they had a relationship, and the result was two children.”

“Two?”

“Lisbeth and her twin sister Camilla.”

“Good God – there are two of her?”

“They’re very different. But that’s another story. Lisbeth’s mother’s name was in fact Agneta Sofia Sjölander. She was seventeen when she met Zalachenko. I don’t know anything else about how they met, but I gather she was quite a dependent young girl and easy prey for an older, more experienced man. She was impressed by him and probably head over heels in love with him. Zalachenko turned out to be anything but nice. I assume he was just after a willing woman and not much else. Naturally she fantasized about a secure future with him, but he wasn’t the least bit interested in marriage. They never did marry, but in 1979 she changed her name from Sjölander to Salander. That was, I suppose, her way of showing that they belonged together.”

“How do you mean?”

“Zala. Salander.”

“Jesus,” Blomkvist said.

“I started looking into the whole matter just before I fell ill. She had the right to take the name because her mother, Lisbeth’s grandmother, was actually named Salander. Then what happened was that Zalachenko proved himself to be a psychopath on a grand scale. He drank and savagely abused Agneta. As far as I know, this abuse went on throughout the girls’ childhood. As long as Lisbeth can remember, Zalachenko would turn up from time to time. Sometimes he would be gone for long periods, but then he was suddenly there again in the apartment on Lundagatan. And every time it was the same old story. He came there to have sex and to get drunk, and it ended with him abusing Lisbeth’s mother in various ways. Lisbeth told me things that indicated it was more than physical abuse. He carried a gun and was threatening, and there were elements of sadism and psychological terrorizing. I gather it only got worse as the years went on. Lisbeth’s mother spent a great part of the eighties living in fear.”

“Did he hit the children too?”

“No. Apparently he was totally uninterested in his daughters. He hardly even said hello to them. Their mother used to send them to their room when Zalachenko turned up, and they weren’t allowed to come out without permission. On one occasion he may have spanked Lisbeth or her sister, but that was mostly because they were irritating him or were somehow in the way. All the violence was directed towards their mother.”

“Jesus Christ. Poor Lisbeth.”

Palmgren nodded. “Lisbeth told me all this about a month before I had my stroke. It was the first time she had spoken openly about what had happened. I’d just decided that it was time to put an end to the absurd declaration of incompetence. Lisbeth is as smart as anyone I know, and I was prepared to take up her case again with the district court. Then I had the stroke… and when I woke up I was here.”

He waved at his confined quarters. A nurse knocked at the door and brought in coffee. Palmgren sat in silence until she left.

“There are some aspects of Lisbeth’s story that I don’t understand,” he said. “Agneta had been forced to go to the hospital dozens of times. I read her medical record. It was perfectly obvious that she was the victim of aggravated assault, and social welfare should have intervened. But nothing happened. Lisbeth and Camilla had to stay at the social emergency service whenever she sought care, but as soon as she was discharged she would go back home and it would start all over again. I can only interpret this as the collapse of the whole social safety net, and Agneta was too terrified to do anything but wait for her torturer. Then something happened. Lisbeth calls it All The Evil.’”

“What was it?”

“Zalachenko had been gone for several months. Lisbeth had turned twelve. She had apparently begun to think that he was gone for good. But he wasn’t, of course. One day he came back. First Agneta locked Lisbeth and her sister in their room. Then she and Zalachenko went to bed. And then he started hitting her. He enjoyed beating people. But this time it wasn’t two helpless little girls who were locked up… The twins reacted quite differently. Camilla was panic-stricken that someone would find out what was going on in their apartment. She repressed everything and made out that her mother was never beaten. When the abuse was over, Camilla would go in and hug her father and pretend that everything was fine.”

“Her way of protecting herself, no doubt.”

“Right. But Lisbeth was a whole different story. This time she interrupted the beating. She went into the kitchen and got a knife and stabbed Zalachenko in the shoulder. She stabbed him five times before he managed to take the knife away and punch her in the face. They weren’t deep wounds, it seems, but he was bleeding like a stuck pig and he ran off.”

“That sounds like Lisbeth.”

Palmgren laughed. “Yes, it does. Don’t ever fight with Lisbeth Salander. Her attitude towards the rest of the world is that if someone threatens her with a gun, she’ll get a bigger gun. That’s what frightens me about what’s going on right now.”

“So that was ‘All The Evil’?”

“No, no. Then two things happened. I can’t understand it. Zalachenko was wounded so badly that he had to go to the hospital. There should have been a police report.”

“But?”

“But as far as I could discover, there were absolutely no repercussions. Lisbeth remembers that a man came and talked with Agneta. She didn’t know what was said or who he was. And then her mother told her that Zalachenko had forgiven her everything.”

“Forgiven?”

“That was the expression she used.”

And suddenly Blomkvist understood.

Björck. Or one of Björck’s colleagues. It was about cleaning up after Zalachenko. Those fucking pigs. He closed his eyes.

“What is it?” Palmgren said.

“I think I know what happened. And someone is going to pay for this. But go on with the story.”

“Zalachenko was gone for several months. Lisbeth waited for him and made her preparations. She had played truant from school every single day to watch out for her mother. She was scared to death that Zalachenko would really hurt her. She was twelve and felt responsible for her mother, who did not dare to go to the police and couldn’t break it off with Zalachenko, or who perhaps did not understand the seriousness of the situation. But on the day Zalachenko finally turned up, Lisbeth was at school. She came home just as he was leaving the apartment. He didn’t say a word. He just laughed at her. Lisbeth went in and found her mother unconscious on the kitchen floor.”

“But Zalachenko didn’t touch Lisbeth?”

“No. She caught up with him just as he was getting into his car. He rolled down the window, possibly to say something. Lisbeth was ready. She threw a milk carton she had filled with gasoline into the car. Then she threw in a burning match.”

“Good God.”

“She tried to kill her father twice. This time there were consequences. A man sitting in a car on Lundagatan burning like a beacon could hardly go unnoticed.”

“But he survived.”

“He suffered horribly. One of his feet had to be amputated. His face and other parts of his body suffered serious burns. And Lisbeth ended up at St.Stefan’s Psychiatric Clinic for Children.”

Despite the fact that she already knew every word by heart, Salander once again read through the material about herself that she had found in Bjurman’s files. She sat in the window seat and opened the cigarette case Miriam Wu had given her. She lit a cigarette and looked out towards Djurgården. She had discovered some things about her life that she had never known before.

In fact so much fell into place that she turned quite cold. Above all she was interested in the report filed by Björck in March 1991. She wasn’t certain which one of the many grown-ups who had talked to her was Björck, but she thought she knew. He had introduced himself with another name. Sven Jansson. She remembered every feature of his face, every word he said, and every gesture he made on the three occasions she had encountered him.

The whole thing was a disaster.

Zalachenko had burned like fury inside the car. He had managed to push open the door and roll out onto the pavement, but his leg got caught inside by the seat belt. People had come rushing up to smother the flames. A fire engine arrived and put out the fire. An ambulance arrived and Lisbeth had tried to get the medics to ignore Zalachenko and come and see to her mother. They had shoved her aside. The police arrived, and there were witnesses who pointed to her. She tried to explain what had happened, but it felt as if nobody was listening to her, and suddenly she was sitting in the backseat of a police car and it took minutes and minutes and minutes and finally almost an hour before the police went into the apartment and found her mother.

Agneta Sofia Salander was unconscious. She had brain damage. The first in a long series of small cerebral haemorrhages had been triggered by the beating. She would never recover.

Salander now understood why nobody had read the police report, why Palmgren had failed in his attempt to have it released, and why even today Prosecutor Ekström, who was leading the search for her, did not have access to it. It had not been written by the regular police. It had been put together by some creep in the Security Police. It had rubber stamps on it saying that the report was classified as top secret according to the law of national security.

Zalachenko had worked for Säpo.

It was no report. It was a cover-up. Zalachenko was more important than Agneta Salander. He could not be identified or exposed. Zalachenko did not exist.

It was not Zalachenko who was the problem – it was Lisbeth Salander, the crazy kid who threatened to crack one of the country’s most crucial secrets wide open.

A secret that she had not known anything about. She brooded. Zalachenko had met her mother very soon after he had arrived in Sweden. He had introduced himself using his real name. Perhaps at that time he had not yet been given a cover name or a Swedish identity, or he was not using it for her. She only knew his real name. But he had been given a new name by the Swedish government. That explained why Lisbeth had never found his name in any public records in all these years.

She got the point. If Zalachenko were accused of aggravated assault, Agneta Salander’s lawyer would start looking into his past. Where do you work, Herr Zalachenko? What’s your real name? Where do you come from?

If Salander ended up with social services maybe somebody would start digging around. She was too young to be charged, but if the gasoline-bomb attack were investigated in too much detail, the same thing would happen. She could imagine the headlines in the papers. The investigation would have to be conducted by a trusted person. And then stamped top secret and buried so deep that nobody would find it. And Salander would have to be buried so deep that nobody would find her either.

Gunnar Björck.

St.Stefan’s.

Peter Teleborian.

The explanation was driving her wild.

Dear Government… I’m going to have a serious talk with you if I ever find anyone to talk to.

She wondered fleetingly what the minister of health and social welfare would think about getting a Molotov cocktail tossed through the front doors of his department. But in the absence of anyone else who could be held responsible, Teleborian was a good substitute. She made a mental note to deal with him in earnest as soon as she had tidied up the rest of this mess.

But she still didn’t understand the whole picture. Zalachenko had suddenly sprung to life again after all these years. He was in danger of being exposed by Svensson. Two shots. Svensson and Johansson. A gun with her fingerprints on it…

Zalachenko or whoever he sent to carry out the executions could not have known that she had found the revolver in the box in Bjurman’s desk drawer and handled it. It had been pure chance, but for her it had already been clear from the start that there had to be a connection between Bjurman and Zala.

Yet the story still did not add up. She mulled it over, trying out the pieces of the puzzle one by one.

There was only one reasonable answer.

Bjurman.

Bjurman had done his investigation into her life. He had discovered the connection. He had turned to Zalachenko.

She had the video of Bjurman raping her. That was her sword over his neck. Perhaps he dreamed that Zalachenko would force her into giving it up.

She hopped down from the window seat, opened her desk drawer, and took out the DVD with BJURMAN written on it in marker pen. She had not even put it in a plastic sleeve. She had not looked at it since she had given Bjurman his very own screening two years ago. She weighed it in her hand and put it back in the drawer.

Bjurman was a fool. If he’d only kept his distance she would have released him as soon as he’d managed to get her declaration of incompetence rescinded. He would have been transformed forever into Zalachenko’s lapdog, and that would have been a fair punishment.

Zalachenko’s network. Some of the tentacles went all the way to Svavelsjö MC.

The blond giant.

He was her key.

She had to find him and force him to tell her where Zalachenko was.

She lit another cigarette and looked out at the citadel next to Skeppsholmen. She looked across to the roller coaster at Gröna Lund. She was talking to herself. And in a voice she had heard once in a film, she said:

Daaaaddyyyyy, I’m coming to get yoooou.

At 7:30 she turned on the TV to catch up on the latest developments in the hunt for Lisbeth Salander. She was stunned by what she saw.

Bublanski finally got hold of Faste on his mobile just after 8:00 in the evening. No pleasantries were exchanged. He did not ask what Faste had been up to, but coolly gave him his instructions.

Faste had had more than he could bear of the circus at headquarters that morning and had done something he had never done before on duty. He went out on the town. He turned off his mobile and sat in the bar at Central Station and drank two beers while he boiled with rage.

Then he went home, took a shower, and went to bed.

He needed to catch up on his sleep.

He woke up in time for Rapport and his eyes almost popped out of his head when he heard the top stories. Bodies dug up in Nykvarn. Salander had shot a leader of Svavelsjö MC. Police hunt through the southern suburbs. The net was tightening.

He turned on his mobile.

Almost immediately that fucker Bublanski called. He said that the investigation was now redirecting its focus to identifying an alternative killer, and that Faste was to relieve Holmberg at the crime scene in Nykvarn. During the wrapping up of the Salander investigation Faste was supposed to be collecting cigarette butts in the woods. Other people would be hunting Salander.

What the hell did Svavelsjö MC have to do with all this?

Suppose there was something to the reasoning of that fucking dyke Modig.

It wasn’t possible.

It had to be Salander.

He wanted to be the one who caught her. He wanted to catch her so badly that it almost made his hands hurt as he held his mobile.

Palmgren calmly watched Blomkvist pace back and forth in front of the window in the small room. It was getting on towards 7:30 in the evening, and they had been talking nonstop for almost an hour. At last Palmgren tapped on the tabletop to get Blomkvist’s attention.

“Sit down before you wear out your shoes,” he said.

Blomkvist sat down.

“All these secrets,” Palmgren said. “I never understood the connection until you explained Zalachenko’s background. All I’ve seen are the assessments of Lisbeth claiming that she’s mentally disturbed.”

“Peter Teleborian.”

“He must have some sort of deal with Björck. They have to have been working together somehow.”

Blomkvist nodded pensively. Whatever happened, Teleborian was going to be the object of journalistic scrutiny.

“Lisbeth said that I should stay away from him. That he was evil.”

Palmgren looked at him sharply. “When did she say that?”

Blomkvist said nothing for some moments. Then he smiled and looked at Palmgren.

“More secrets, damn it. I’ve been in touch with her while she’s been in hiding. By computer. Only short, cryptic messages on her part, but she has always led me in the right direction.”

Palmgren sighed. “And of course you didn’t tell the police.”

“No. Not exactly.”

“Then you haven’t told me either. She’s quite good with computers.”

You have no idea how good.

“I have a great belief in her ability to land on her feet. She may be hard up, but she’s a survivor.”

Not that hard up. She stole almost three billion kronor. She’s not going to starve. She has a bag full of gold, just like Pippi Longstocking.

“What I don’t quite understand,” Blomkvist said, “is why you didn’t take up her case in all those years.”

Palmgren sighed again. He felt infinitely sad.

“I failed her,” he said. “When I became her trustee she was only one in a series of difficult young people with problems. I’ve dealt with dozens of others. I was given the assignment by Stefan Brådhensjö when he was minister of welfare. By then she was already at St.Stefan’s, and I didn’t even see her that first year. I talked to Teleborian a couple of times and he explained that she was psychotic and that she was getting the best possible care. I believed him – and why not? But I also talked to Jonas Beringer, who was senior clinician at that time. I don’t think he had anything to do with her case. He made an assessment at my request, and we agreed to try and get her back into society again by way of a foster family. That was when she was fifteen.”

“And you backed her up over the years.”

“Not enough. I took her side after the episode in the tunnelbana. By then I had gotten to know her and I liked her a lot. She was feisty. I stopped them from putting her back in an institution. The price of that was that she was declared incompetent and I became her guardian.”

“Presumably Björck wasn’t running around telling the court what to decide. It would have attracted attention. He wanted her locked up, and he counted on painting a bleak picture of her through psychiatric assessments from Teleborian and others, assuming that the court would come to the logical conclusion. But instead they followed your recommendation.”

“I’ve never thought that she ought to be under guardianship. But to be honest, I didn’t do much to get the ruling reversed. I should have acted sooner and more forcefully. But I was quite enchanted by Lisbeth and… I always put it off. I had too many irons in the fire. And then I got sick.”

“I don’t think you should blame yourself. No-one else looked after her interests better over the years.”

“The problem was always that I didn’t know enough. Lisbeth was my client, but she never uttered a word about Zalachenko. When she got out of St.Stefan’s it was years before she manifested the slightest trust in me. It was only after the hearing that I sensed she was very slowly starting to communicate with me beyond the necessary formalities.”

“How did she happen to start telling you about Zalachenko?”

“I suppose that in spite of everything she had begun to trust me. Besides, on a number of occasions I’d raised the subject of having the incompetency declaration rescinded. Apparently, she thought it over and then one day she called and wanted to meet. And she told me the whole story about Zalachenko and how she viewed what had happened. You’ll probably appreciate that it was a lot for me to take in. But I started digging around in the story straightaway. I couldn’t find a Zalachenko in any database in all of Sweden. I did sometimes wonder whether she might be imagining the whole thing.”

“After you had your stroke, Bjurman became her guardian. That couldn’t have been an accident.”

“No. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to prove it, but I’ve been thinking that if we tried hard enough we would find… whoever it is that took over after Björck and is in charge of the cleanup of the Zalachenko affair.”

“I don’t wonder at Lisbeth’s absolute refusal to talk to psychiatrists or the authorities,” Blomkvist said. “Every time she did, it only made matters worse. She tried to explain what had happened and no-one listened. She, a child all by herself, tried to save her mother’s life and defend her against a psychopath. In the end she did the only thing she felt she could do. And instead of saying ‘well done’ and ‘good girl,’ they locked her up in an asylum.”

“It’s not that straightforward. I hope you understand that there really is something wrong with Lisbeth,” Palmgren said sharply.

“How do you mean?”

“You’re aware that she had a lot of trouble when she was growing up and problems in school and all that.”

“It’s been in every daily paper. And I would have had trouble in school myself if I’d had the childhood she had.”

“Her problems go way beyond the problems she had at home. I’ve read all the psychiatric assessments, and there isn’t even a diagnosis. I think we can agree that Lisbeth Salander isn’t like normal people. Have you ever played chess with her?”

“No.”

“She has a photographic memory.”

“I know. I realized that when I was working with her.”

“She loves puzzles. One time when she came over for Christmas dinner I enticed her into solving some problems from a Mensa intelligence test. It was the kind where they show you five similar symbols and you have to decide what the sixth one will look like. I’d tried myself and got about half of them right. And I plodded away at it for two evenings. She took one look at the paper and answered every question correctly.”

“Lisbeth is a very special girl.”

“She has an extremely hard time relating to other people. I thought she had Asperger’s syndrome or something like it. If you read the clinical descriptions of patients diagnosed with Asperger’s, there are things that seem to fit Lisbeth very well, but there are just as many symptoms that don’t apply at all. Mind you, she’s not the least bit dangerous to people who leave her in peace and treat her with respect. But she is violent, without a doubt,” said Palmgren in a low voice. “If she’s provoked or threatened, she can strike back with appalling violence.”

Blomkvist nodded.

“The question is, what do we do now?” Palmgren said.

“We find Zalachenko,” Blomkvist said.

At that moment Dr. Sivarnandan knocked and came in.

“I hope I’m not disturbing you. But if you’re interested in Lisbeth Salander, you might want to turn on the TV and watch the news.”

CHAPTER 29

Salander was shaking with rage. That morning she had gone to Bjurman’s summer cabin in peace and quiet. She hadn’t opened her computer since the night before, and during the day she had been too busy to listen to the news. She was half expecting the incident in Stallarholmen to get a mention, but she was completely unprepared for the storm that she now encountered on the TV news.

Miriam Wu was in Söder hospital, attacked and badly wounded by a gigantic assailant who had kidnapped her outside the apartment building on Lundagatan. Her condition was described as serious.

She’d been rescued by the former professional boxer Paolo Roberto. How he had come to be in a warehouse in Nykvarn was not explained. He was mobbed by reporters when he came out of the hospital, but he didn’t want to make any comments. His face looked as if he had gone ten rounds with his hands tied behind his back.

Two bodies had been found buried in the woods close to where Miriam Wu had been assaulted. It was reported that the police had designated a third site to be excavated as well, and that this might not be the last of it.

And then there was the search for the fugitive Lisbeth Salander.

The net, so they said, was tightening. That day the police had surrounded the neighbourhood of Stallarholmen. She was armed and dangerous. She had shot and wounded a Hell’s Angels biker, possibly two. The shoot-out had taken place at the summer cabin of the murdered lawyer Nils Bjurman. By evening the police were ready to concede that she might have managed to elude the cordon.

Ekström had called a press conference. His responses were evasive. No, he could not say whether Salander had dealings with the Hell’s Angels. No, he could not confirm the rumour that Salander had been seen at the warehouse in Nykvarn. No, there was nothing to indicate that this was an underworld gang war. No, it could not be confirmed that Salander alone was responsible for the Enskede murders. They were now searching for her solely to question her about the circumstances of the murders.

Salander frowned. Something had shifted within the police investigation.

She went online and first read the newspapers’ reports, then accessed the hard drives of Ekström, Armansky, and Blomkvist, one by one.

Ekström’s email contained several messages of interest, in particular a memo sent by Jan Bublanski at 5:22 p.m. The email was brisk and devastatingly critical of Ekström’s management of the preliminary investigation. It ended with what was effectively an ultimatum. He demanded (a) that Inspector Modig be reinstated, effective immediately; (b) that the focus of the investigation be redirected so as to explore alternative solutions to the Enskede murders; and (c) that research be started without delay on the figure known only as Zala.

The accusations against Salander are based on a single direct piece of evidence – her fingerprints on the murder weapon. Which, I remind you, is proof that she handled the weapon but no proof that she fired it, and even less that she fired it at the murder victims.

We now know there are other players involved. The Södertälje police have found (so far) two bodies in shallow graves close to a warehouse owned by a cousin of Carl-Magnus Lundin. It should be obvious that Salander, however violent and whatever her psychological profile, had nothing to do with those deaths.

Bublanski finished by saying that if his demands were not met he would leave the investigative team, which he did not intend to do quietly. Ekström had replied that Bublanski should do what he thought was best. Salander obtained even more surprising information from Armansky’s hard drive. A brief exchange of emails with Milton’s payroll office established that Niklas Hedström had left the company, effective immediately. He would get vacation pay and three months’ severance. An email to the manager on duty stated that if Hedström came back to the building he could be escorted to his desk to remove personal effects and then escorted from the premises. An email to the technical department advised them that Hedström’s card key was to be devalidated.

But most interesting was an exchange between Armansky and Milton Security’s lawyer, Frank Alenius. Armansky asked how Salander could best be represented in the event that she was taken into custody. Alenius replied that there was no reason for Milton to become concerned with a former employee who had committed murder – it would not reflect well upon Milton Security were the company to be so involved. Armansky replied brusquely that Salander’s involvement in any murder was still an open question, and that his concern was to provide support for a former employee whom he considered innocent.

Blomkvist had not, Salander discovered, been on his computer since early the previous day. So no news.

Bohman laid the folder on the table in Armansky’s office. He sat down heavily. Fräklund opened it and began to read. Armansky stood by the window looking out at Gamla Stan.

“This is the last report I can deliver. I’ve been kicked off the investigation,” Bohman said.

“Not your fault,” Fräklund said.

“No, not your fault,” Armansky said and sat down. He had collected all the material that Bohman had provided over the course of two weeks in a pile on the conference table.

“I talked to Bublanski. You’ve done a good job, Sonny. He is sorry to lose you, but he had no choice because of Hedström.”

“That’s OK. I discovered that I get along much better here at Milton than down at Kungsholmen.”

“Can you give us a summary?”

“Well, if the objective was to find Lisbeth Salander, then obviously we failed. It was a very messy investigation with a number of competing personalities, and Bublanski may not have had ultimate control over the search.”

“Hans Faste –”

“Faste is a real fuckup. But the problem is not just Faste and a sloppy investigation. Bublanski saw to it that all the leads were followed as far as they could be. The fact is, Salander has been damn good at covering her tracks.”

“But your job wasn’t only to pin down Salander,” Armansky said.

“No, and I’m thankful that we didn’t tell Hedström about my other assignment to act as your mole and see to it that Salander wasn’t falsely accused.”

“And what do you think today?”

“When we started I was positive that she was guilty. Today I’m not sure one way or the other. So many things don’t fit…”

“Yes?”

“Well, I would no longer consider her the prime suspect. I’m leaning more and more towards thinking there’s something to Mikael Blomkvist’s reasoning.”

“Which means that we have to identify and find the killers. Shall we take the investigation from the beginning?” Armansky said, pouring coffee.

Salander had one of the worst evenings of her life. She was thinking about when she had thrown the firebomb into Zalachenko’s car. In that instant the nightmares stopped and she had felt a great inner peace. She had had other problems, but they had always been about her, and she could handle them. Now it was about Mimmi.

Mimmi had been beaten up and was in the hospital. She was innocent. She’d had nothing to do with any of this. Her only crime was that she knew Salander.

She cursed herself. She was riddled with feelings of guilt. The blame was all hers. Her address was secret; she was safe. And then she had persuaded Mimmi to live in her apartment, at the address that anyone could find.

How could she have been so thoughtless? She might as well have beaten her up herself.

She felt so wretched that tears came to her eyes. But Salander never cried. She wiped them away.

At 10:30 she was so restless that she could not stay in the apartment. She put on her coat and boots and set off into the night. She walked down side streets until she reached Ringvägen and stood at the end of the driveway to Söder hospital. She wanted to go to Mimmi’s room and wake her up and tell her that everything was going to be all right. Then she saw blue lights from a police car near Zinken and stepped into an alleyway to avoid being seen.

She was home again just after midnight. She was freezing, so she undressed and crawled into bed. She could not sleep. At 1:00 a.m. she was up again, walking naked through the unlit apartment. She went into the guest bedroom, where there was a bed and a desk. She had never set foot in it before. She sat on the floor with her back to the wall and stared into the night.

Lisbeth Salander has a guest bedroom. What a joke.

She sat there until after 2:00, and by then she was so cold that she was shivering. Then she started to cry again.

Some time before dawn, Salander took a shower and dressed. She put on the coffeemaker and made breakfast and turned on her computer. She went into Blomkvist’s hard drive. She was surprised to discover that he had not updated his research journal, and instead she opened the folder. There was a new document titled [Lisbeth-IMPORTANT]. She looked at the document properties. It had been created at 12:52 a.m. She double-clicked.

Salander read the document slowly again. Kalle Blomkvist had been busy. Practical Pig. Practical Fucking Pig. He still thought there was something to solve.

He meant well. He wanted to help.

He didn’t understand that whatever happened, her life was over.

It had ended before she even turned thirteen.

There was only one solution.

She created a new document and tried to write a reply, but the thoughts were whirling around in her head and there were so many things she wanted to say to him.

Salander in love. What a fucking joke.

He would never find out. She would never give him the satisfaction.

She deleted the document and stared at the empty screen. But no answer at all was less than he deserved. He had stood faithfully in her corner like a steadfast tin soldier. She created a new document and wrote:

First she had a number of logistical decisions to take. She needed a means of transport. Using the burgundy Honda, still on Lundagatan, was tempting but out of the question. There was nothing in Prosecutor Ekström’s laptop to indicate that anyone in the police investigation had discovered that she had bought a car, which might be because she had not yet managed to send in the registration documents and insurance papers. But Mimmi might have talked about the car when she was questioned by the police, and obviously Lundagatan was under sporadic surveillance.

The police knew that she had a motorcycle, and it would be even more obtrusive to take it out of storage from the apartment building on Lundagatan. Besides, after a number of summer-like days, a change in the weather was forecast, and she had no great desire to venture out on a bike on rain-slick highways.

One alternative, of course, would be to rent a car in Irene Nesser’s name, but there were risks involved with that too. Someone might recognize her, and the fake identity would then be lost to her. That would be a catastrophe; it was her escape route out of the country.

Then she gave a lopsided smile. There was one other possibility. She booted up her computer, logged on to Milton Security’s network and navigated to the car pool, which was administered by a secretary in Milton’s reception area. Milton Security had close to forty cars at its disposal, some of which carried the company logo and were used on business trips. The majority were unmarked surveillance cars, and these were kept in the garage at Milton’s HQ near Slussen. Practically around the corner.

She studied the personnel files and chose employee Marcus Collander, who had just gone on vacation for two weeks. He had left the telephone number of a hotel in the Canary Islands. She changed the hotel name and scrambled the digits of the phone number where he could be reached. Then she entered a note that Collander’s last action while on duty had been to drop off one of the cars for servicing. She picked a Toyota Corolla automatic, which she had driven before, and recorded that it would be back a week later.

Finally she went into the surveillance system and reprogrammed the cameras she would have to walk past. Between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. they would show a repeat of the previous half hour, but with an altered time code.

At 4:15 she packed her backpack. She had two changes of clothes, two Mace canisters, and the fully charged Taser. She looked at the two guns she had acquired. She rejected Sandström’s Colt 1911 Government and chose Nieminen’s Polish P-83 Wanad, which had one round missing from the magazine. It was slimmer and fit her hand better. She put it into her jacket pocket.

Salander closed the lid of her PowerBook but left the computer on the desk. She had transferred the contents of her hard drive to an encrypted backup on the Net and then erased her whole hard drive with a programme she had written herself, which guaranteed that not even she could reconstruct the contents. She did not want to rely on her Power-Book, which would just be cumbersome to drag around. Instead she took her Palm Tungsten PDA with her.

She looked around her office. She had a feeling that she would not be coming back to the apartment in Mosebacke and knew that she was leaving secrets behind that she should probably destroy. But glancing at her watch she realized that she did not have much time. She turned off the desk lamp.

She walked to Milton Security, went into the garage, and took the elevator up to the administrative offices. She met no-one in the empty corridors and taking the car keys out of the unlocked cabinet in reception presented no difficulty.

She was in the garage thirty seconds later, and blipped open the door lock on the Corolla. She dumped her backpack in the passenger seat and adjusted the driver’s seat and the rearview mirror. She used her old card key to open the garage door.

Just before 5:00 she turned up from Söder Mälarstrand at Västerbron. It was starting to get light.

Blomkvist woke up at 6:30. He had not set his alarm clock and had slept for only three hours. He got up and switched on his iBook and opened the folder to look for her reply.

Blomkvist felt a chill run down his spine. Hardly the answer he had hoped for. It felt like a farewell letter. Salander alone against the world. He went to the kitchen and started the coffeemaker and then had a shower. He put on a pair of worn jeans and realized that he had not had time to do laundry for weeks. He had no clean shirts. He put on a wine-red sweatshirt under his grey jacket.

As he made breakfast in the kitchen, a glint of metal on the counter behind the microwave caught his eye. With a fork he fished out a key ring.

Salander’s keys. He had found them after the attack on Lundagatan and put them on top of the microwave with her shoulder bag. He had forgotten to give them to Inspector Modig with the bag, and they must have fallen down in back.

He stared at the bunch of keys. Three large ones and three small. The three large keys were presumably to an entrance door, an apartment, and a dead bolt. Her apartment. Obviously not the apartment on Lundagatan. So where the hell did she live?

He examined the three small keys more closely. One was probably for her Kawasaki. One looked like it was for a safety-deposit box or storage cabinet. He held up the third key. The number 24914 was stamped on it. The realization hit him.

A P.O. box. Lisbeth Salander has a P.O. box.

He looked up the post offices in Södermalm in the phone book. She had lived on Lundagatan. Ringvägen was too far away. Maybe Hornsgatan. Or Rosenlundsgatan.

He turned off the coffeemaker, abandoned his breakfast, and drove Berger’s BMW to Rosenlundsgatan. The key did not fit. He drove on to Hornsgatan. The key fit perfectly in box 24914. He opened it and found twenty-two items of post, which he stuffed into the outside pocket of his laptop case.

He drove on to Hornsgatan, parked by the Kvarter cinema, and had breakfast at Copacabana on Bergsundsstrand. As he waited for his caffè latte he examined the letters one by one. All were addressed to Wasp Enterprises. Nine letters had been sent from Switzerland, eight from the Cayman Islands, one from the Channel Islands, and four from Gibraltar.

With no pang of conscience he slit open the envelopes. The first twenty-one contained bank statements and reports on various accounts and funds. Salander was as rich as a troll.

The twenty-second letter was thicker. The address was handwritten. The envelope had a printed logo and the return address of Buchanan House, Queensway Quay, Gibraltar. The enclosed letter was on the stationery of a Jeremy S. MacMillan, Solicitor. He had neat handwriting.

The letter was dated January 24. Salander apparently did not pick up her mail very often. Blomkvist looked at the attached documentation for the purchase of an apartment in a building at Fiskargatan 9 in Mosebacke.

Then he almost choked on his coffee. The price paid was twenty-five million kronor, and the deal was concluded with two payments a year apart.

Salander watched a solid, dark-haired man unlock the side door of Auto-Expert in Eskilstuna. It was a garage, a repair shop, and a car rental agency. A typical franchise. It was 6:50, and according to a handwritten sign on the front door, the shop did not open until 7:30. She went across the street and followed the man through the side door into the shop. The man heard her and turned round.

“Refik Alba?” she said.

“Yes. Who are you? I’m not open yet.”

She raised Nieminen’s P-83 Wanad and held the weapon with two hands aimed at his face.

“I don’t want to haggle with you. I just want to see your list of cars rented out. I want to see it now. You have ten seconds to produce it.”

Refik Alba was forty-two years old, a Kurd born in Diyarbakir, and he had seen his fill of guns. He stood as if paralyzed. Then he concluded that if this crazy woman came into his garage with a pistol in her hand, there was not going to be much to discuss.

“It’s on the computer,” he said.

“Turn it on.”

He did as she told him.

“What’s behind that door?” she asked as the computer booted up and the screen began to flicker.

“It’s just a closet.”

“Open it.”

It contained some overalls.

“OK. Go into the closet, stay calm, and I won’t have to hurt you.”

He obeyed her without protest.

“Take out your mobile, put it on the floor, and kick it over to me.”

He did as she said.

“Good. Now close the door behind you.”

It was an antique PC with Windows 95 and a 280 MB hard drive. It took an eternity to open the Excel document with the car rental listing. The white Volvo had been rented on two occasions. First for two weeks in January, and then from March 1. It had not yet been returned. He was paying a weekly fee for a long-term rental.

The name was Ronald Niedermann.

She looked through the folders on the shelf above the computer. One of them had the label IDENTIFICATION printed neatly on it. She took the folder down and paged through to Ronald Niedermann. When he rented the car in January he had given his passport as ID, and Refik Alba had made a photocopy. She recognized the blond hulk at once. According to the passport he was German, thirty-five years old, born in Hamburg. The fact that Alba had made a copy from the passport showed that Niedermann was just a customer, not a friend.

At the bottom of the page Alba had written a mobile number and a P.O. box address in Göteborg.

Salander replaced the folder and turned off the computer. She looked around and found a rubber doorstop next to the front door. She picked it up and went back to the closet and knocked on the door with the barrel of her gun.

“Can you hear me in there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who I am?”

Silence.

He’d have to be blind not to recognize me.

“OK. You know who I am. Are you afraid of me?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be afraid of me, Herr Alba. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m almost finished here. I’m sorry for putting you to this trouble.”

“Uh… OK.”

“Have you got enough air to breathe in there?”

“Yes… what do you want, anyway?”

“I wanted to see whether a certain woman had hired a car from you two years ago,” she lied. “I didn’t find what I wanted, but it’s not your fault. I’ll be leaving in a few minutes. I’m going to put the doorstop under the closet door here. The door is thin enough for you to break your way out, but it will take a while. You don’t have to call the police. You’ll never see me again, and you can open up as usual today and pretend that this never happened.”

The chances of him not calling the police were pretty remote, but it did not hurt to give him the option to think about. She left the garage and walked to the Toyota Corolla around the corner, where she swiftly changed into Irene Nesser.

She was annoyed not to have found a street address for Ronald Niedermann in the Stockholm area, just a P.O. box address on the other side of Sweden. But it was the only lead she had. So, to Göteborg.

She made for the E20 and turned west towards Arboga. She turned on the radio, but she had just missed the news and got some commercial station. She listened to David Bowie singing “putting out fire with gasoline.” She didn’t know the name of the song, but she took the words as prophetic.

CHAPTER 30

Blomkvist looked at the entrance door of Fiskargatan 9. It was one of Stockholm’s most exclusive addresses. He put the key in the lock and it turned perfectly. The list of residents in the lobby was no help. Blomkvist assumed it would be mostly corporate apartments, but there seemed to be one or two private residences among them. It hardly surprised him that Salander’s name was not listed, yet it still seemed unlikely that this would be her hideout.

He walked up floor by floor, reading the nameplates on the doors. None of them rang a bell. Then he got to the top floor and read

V. KULLA.

Blomkvist slapped his forehead. He had to smile. The choice of name may not have been intended to make fun of him personally; it was more likely some private ironic reflection of Salander’s – but where else should Kalle Blomkvist, nicknamed for an Astrid Lindgren character, look for her than at Pippi Longstocking’s Villa Villekulla?

He rang the doorbell and waited a minute. Then he took out the keys and unfastened the dead bolt and the bottom lock.

The instant he opened the door, the burglar alarm device was activated.

Salander’s mobile began beeping. She was near Glanshammar just outside Örebro. She braked and pulled onto the shoulder. She took her Palm from her jacket pocket and plugged it into her phone.

Fifteen seconds earlier someone had opened the door to her apartment. The alarm was not connected to any security company. Its only purpose was to alert her that someone had broken in or had opened the door in some other way. After thirty seconds an alarm bell would go off and the uninvited visitor would get an unpleasant surprise in the form of a paint bomb hidden in a fake fuse box next to the door. She smiled in anticipation and counted down the seconds.

Blomkvist stared in frustration at the alarm display by the door. For some reason he hadn’t even thought that the apartment might have an alarm. He watched the digital clock counting down. Millennium’s alarm was triggered if someone failed to key in the correct four-digit code within thirty seconds, and shortly thereafter a couple of muscular guys from a security company would come through the door.

His first impulse was to close the door and make a quick exit from the building. But he just stood there, frozen to the spot.

Four digits. Impossible to guess the code at random.

25-24-23-22…

Damned Pippi Long…

19-18…

What code would you use?

15-14-13…

He felt his panic growing.

10-9-8…

Then he raised his hand and desperately punched in the only number he could think of: 9277. The numbers that corresponded to the letters W-A-S-P on the keypad.

To his astonishment the countdown stopped with six seconds to go. Then the alarm beeped one last time before the display was reset to zero and a green light came on.

Salander opened her eyes wide. She thought she had to be seeing things and actually shook her PDA, which she realized was irrational. The countdown had stopped six seconds before the paint bomb was supposed to explode. And a second later the display reset to zero.

Impossible.

No other person in the world knew the code.

How could it be possible? The police? No. Zala? Inconceivable.

She dialled a number on her mobile and waited for the surveillance camera to connect and begin to send low-resolution images through.

The camera was hidden in what looked like a smoke detector in the hall ceiling, and it took a low-res photograph every second. She played back the sequence from zero, the moment the door was opened and the alarm activated. Then a lopsided smile spread across her face as she looked down at Mikael Blomkvist, who for half a minute acted out a jerky pantomime before he finally punched in the code and then leaned on the doorjamb looking as though he had just avoided having a heart attack.

Kalle Fucking Blomkvist had tracked her down.

He had the keys she had dropped on Lundagatan. He was smart enough to remember that Wasp was her handle on the Net. And if he had found the apartment, then he had probably also worked out that it was owned by Wasp Enterprises. As she watched he began to move jerkily down the hall and disappeared from the camera’s view.

Shit. How could I have been so predictable? And why did I drop those keys?… Now her every secret lay open to Blomkvist’s prying eyes.

After thinking about it for a couple of minutes she decided that it no longer made any difference. She had erased the hard drive. That was the important thing. It could even be to her advantage that he was the one to have found her hideout. He already knew more of her secrets than anyone else did. Practical Pig would do the right thing. He would not sell her out. She hoped. She put the car in drive and pressed on, deep in thought, towards Göteborg.

Eriksson ran into Paolo Roberto in the stairwell to Millennium’s offices when she arrived at 8:30. She recognized him at once, introduced herself, and let him in. He had a bad limp. She smelled coffee and knew that Berger was already there.

“Hello, Erika. Thanks for agreeing to see me at such short notice,” the boxer said.

Berger studied the impressive collection of bruises and lumps on his face before she leaned forward and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“You look like shit,” she said.

“I’ve broken my nose before. Where are you keeping Blomkvist?”

“He’s out somewhere playing detective, looking for leads. As usual it’s impossible to get hold of him. Except for a strange email last night I haven’t heard from him since yesterday morning. Thank you for… well, thanks.”

She pointed to his face.

Paolo Roberto laughed.

“Would you like coffee? You said you had something to tell me. Malin, join us.”

They sat in the comfortable chairs in Berger’s office.

“It’s that big blond fucker I had the fight with. I told Mikael that his boxing wasn’t worth a rotten lingonberry. But the funny thing was, he kept assuming the defensive position with his fists and circled around as if he were a boxer. It seemed as if he had actually had some sort of training.”

“Mikael mentioned that on the phone yesterday,” Eriksson said.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so yesterday when I got home I sat down and sent out emails to boxing clubs all over Europe. I described what had happened and gave as detailed a description as I could of the guy.”

“Did you have any luck?”

“I think I got a nibble.”

He put a faxed photograph on the table in front of Berger and Eriksson. It looked to have been taken during a training session at a boxing club. Two boxers were standing listening to instructions from a heavyset older man in a narrow-brimmed leather hat and tracksuit. Half a dozen people were hanging around the ring listening. In the background stood a large man who looked like a skinhead. A circle had been drawn around him with a marker pen.

“The picture is seventeen years old. The guy in the background is Ronald Niedermann. He was eighteen when the picture was taken, so he should be about thirty-five now. That fits with the giant that kidnapped Miriam Wu. I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that it’s him. The picture is a little too old and it’s poor quality. But I can say that he looks quite similar.”

“Where did you get the picture?”

“I got an answer from Hans Münster, a veteran trainer at Dynamic in Hamburg. Ronald Niedermann boxed for them for a year in the late eighties. Or rather, he tried to box for them. I got the email first thing this morning and called Münster before I came here. To sum up what Münster said: Niedermann is from Hamburg and hung out with a skinhead gang in the eighties. He has a brother a few years older, a very talented boxer, and it was through him that he joined the club. Niedermann had fearsome strength and a physique that was almost unparalleled. Münster said that he’d never seen anyone hit so hard, not even among the elite. They measured the weight of his punch one time and he went right off the scale.”

“It sounds as though he could have made a career in the ring,” Berger said.

Paolo Roberto shook his head. “According to Münster he was impossible, for several reasons. First, he couldn’t learn to box. He would stand still throwing haymakers. He was phenomenally clumsy – that fits the guy I fought in Nykvarn – but what was worse, he didn’t understand his own strength. Now and then he’d land a punch that would cause a horrible injury during sparring practice. There were broken noses and jaws – a whole series of unnecessary injuries. They just couldn’t keep him around.”

“So he could box, but not really. Is that it?” Eriksson said.

“Exactly. But the reason for him stopping was medical.”

“How do you mean?”

“He was apparently invulnerable. It didn’t matter how many punches he took, he just shook them off and kept fighting. It turned out that he suffers from a very rare condition called congenital analgesia. I looked it up. It’s an inherited genetic defect that means the transmitter substance in his nerve synapses doesn’t function properly. Or in lay terms, he can’t feel pain.”

“That sounds like a gold mine for a boxer.”

Paolo Roberto shook his head once more. “On the contrary. It can be a life-threatening disorder. Most people with congenital analgesia die relatively young, between twenty and twenty-five. Pain is the body’s warning system that something’s wrong. If you put your hand on a red-hot burner, it hurts and you snatch it away. But if you have this disease you don’t do anything until you start smelling burned flesh.”

Eriksson and Berger looked at each other.

“Are you serious?” Berger said.

“Absolutely. Niedermann can’t feel a thing, and he goes around as if he’s had a massive dose of local anaesthesia twenty-four hours a day. He’s managed to deal with it because he has another genetic feature that compensates for it. He has an extraordinary build with an extremely strong skeleton, which makes him almost invulnerable. His raw strength is damn near unique. And above all, he must heal easily.”

“I’m beginning to understand what an interesting boxing match it must have been.”

“It certainly was that. I wouldn’t want to do it again. The only thing that made an impression on him was when Miriam Wu kicked him in the balls. He actually fell to his knees for a second… which must be because there’s some sort of physical reaction connected to a blow of that type, since he doesn’t feel any pain. And believe me – even I would have collapsed if she had kicked me like that.”

“So how did you end up beating him?”

“People with this disease can in fact be injured just like anyone else. Forget that Niedermann seems to have bones of concrete. But when I whacked him with a plank on the back of his head he dropped like a rock. He was probably concussed.”

Berger looked at Eriksson.

“I’ll call Mikael,” Eriksson said.

Blomkvist heard his mobile go off, but he was so stunned that he did not answer until the fifth ring.

“Hi, it’s Malin. Paolo Roberto thinks he’s identified the giant.”

“That’s good,” Blomkvist said absentmindedly.

“Where are you?”

“That’s hard to say.”

“You sound funny.”

“Sorry. What did you say?”

Eriksson summed up Paolo Roberto’s story.

“Follow up on it,” Blomkvist said, “and see if you can find him in some database. I think it’s urgent. Call me on my mobile.”

To Eriksson’s surprise, he disconnected without even saying goodbye.

Blomkvist was standing at that moment by a window, looking out at a magnificent view that stretched far from Gamla Stan towards Saltsjön. He felt numb. There was a kitchen off the hall to the right of the front door. Then there was a living room, an office, a bedroom, and even a small guest room that seemed not to have been used. The mattress was still in its plastic wrapper and there were no sheets. All the furniture was brand-new, straight from IKEA.

What floored Blomkvist was that Salander had bought the pied-à-terre that had belonged to Percy Barnevik, a captain of industry. The apartment was about 3,800 square feet and worth twenty-five million kronor.

Blomkvist wandered through deserted, almost eerily empty corridors and rooms with patterned parquet floors of different kinds of wood, and Tricia Guild wallpaper of the type that Berger had at one time coveted. At the centre of the apartment was a wonderfully bright living room with an open fireplace, but Salander seemed never to have had a fire. There was an enormous balcony with a fantastic view. There was a laundry room, a sauna, a gym, storage rooms, and a bathroom with a king-size bath. There was even a wine cellar, which was empty except for an unopened bottle of Quinta do Noval port – Nacional! – from 1976. Blomkvist struggled to imagine Salander with a glass of port in her hand. An elegant card indicated that it had been a moving-in present from the estate agent.

The kitchen contained all manner of equipment, with a shiny French gourmet stove with a gas oven as the focus. Blomkvist had never before set eyes on a La Cornue Château 120. Salander probably used it for boiling tea water.

On the other hand he admired with awe the espresso machine on its own separate table. She had a Jura Impressa X7 with an attached milk cooler. The machine looked barely used and had probably been in the kitchen when she bought the apartment. Blomkvist knew that a Jura was the espresso equivalent of a Rolls-Royce – a professional machine for domestic use that cost in the neighbourhood of 70,000 kronor. He had an espresso machine that he had bought at John Wall, which had cost around 3,500 kronor – one of the few extravagances he had allowed himself for his own household, and a fraction of the grandeur of Salander’s machine.

The refrigerator contained an open milk carton, some cheese, butter, caviar, and a half-empty jar of pickled gherkins. The kitchen cupboard contained four half-empty jars of vitamins, tea bags, coffee for an ordinary coffeemaker, two loaves of bread, and a packet of crispbreads. On the kitchen table was a bowl of apples. There were three ham pies and a fish casserole in the freezer. That was all the food he found in the apartment. In the trash under the counter next to the stove he saw several empty packages for Billy’s Pan Pizza.

The arrangement was all out of proportion. Salander had stolen several billion kronor and bought herself an apartment with space for an entire court. But she only needed the three rooms she had furnished. The other eighteen rooms were empty.

Blomkvist ended his tour in her office. There were no flowers anywhere. There were no paintings or even posters on the walls. There were no rugs or wall hangings. He could not see a single decorative bowl, candlestick, or even a knickknack that had been saved for sentimental reasons.

Blomkvist felt as if someone were squeezing his heart. He felt that he had to find Salander and hold her close.

She would probably bite him if he tried.

Fucking Zalachenko.

Then he sat down at her desk and opened the folder with Björck’s report from 1991. He did not read it all, but skimmed through it, trying to absorb the essentials.

He booted up her PowerBook with the 17-inch screen, 200 GB hard drive, and 1,000 MB of RAM. It was empty. She had wiped it. That was ominous.

He opened her desk drawer and found a 9 mm Colt 1911 Government single-action with a fully loaded magazine, seven rounds. It was the pistol Salander had taken from the journalist Sandström, though Blomkvist knew nothing about that. He had not yet reached the letter S on the list of johns.

Then he found a DVD marked BJURMAN.

He stuck it into his iBook and watched its contents with horror. He sat in stunned silence as he saw Salander beaten up, raped, almost murdered. The film seemed to have been made with a hidden camera. He did not watch it all but skipped from one section to the next, each worse than the last.

Bjurman.

Salander’s guardian had raped her, and she had documented the event to the final detail. A digital date showed that the film had been recorded two years earlier. That was before he met her. Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.

Björck and Bjurman together with Zalachenko in the seventies.

Zalachenko and Salander and a Molotov cocktail made from a milk carton in the early nineties.

Then Bjurman again, now her guardian, having replaced Palmgren. The circle had been closed. Bjurman had attacked his ward. He had treated her as a mentally ill, defenceless girl, but Salander was anything but defenceless. She was the girl who at the age of twelve had gone to war with a hit man who had defected from the GRU, and she had crippled him for life.

Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.

He thought back to the time when he had come to know her in Hedestad. It must have been a matter of months after the rape. He could not recall that she had hinted by so much as a single word that any such thing had happened to her. She had not revealed much at all about herself. Blomkvist could not guess what she had done to Bjurman – but she had not killed him. Oddly enough. Otherwise Bjurman would have been dead two years ago. She must have been controlling him in some way and for some purpose that he could not begin to understand. Then he realized that he had the means of her control right there on the desk. The DVD. As long as she had that, Bjurman was her helpless slave. And Bjurman had turned to the man he supposed was an ally. Zalachenko. Her worst enemy. Her father.

Then a whole chain of events. Bjurman had been shot first, then Svensson and Johansson.

But how? What could have made Svensson such a threat?

And suddenly he knew what must have happened in Enskede.

Blomkvist found a piece of paper on the floor beneath the window. Salander had printed out a page, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it away. He smoothed it out. It was from Aftonbladet’s online edition about the kidnapping of Miriam Wu.

He did not know what role Wu had played in the drama – if any – but she had been one of Salander’s very few friends. Maybe her only friend. Salander had given her old apartment to her. Now she was lying in the hospital, badly beaten.

Niedermann and Zalachenko.

First her mother. Then Miriam Wu. Salander must be crazy with hatred.

This was one provocation too many.

And now she was on the hunt.

At lunchtime Armansky received a call from the rehabilitation home in Ersta. He had expected to hear from Palmgren much earlier and had avoided making contact with him. He’d been afraid that he would have to report that Salander was guilty beyond all doubt. Now at least he could tell him that there was in fact reasonable doubt of her guilt.

“How far did you get?” Palmgren said without beating about the bush.

“With what?”

“With your investigation of Salander.”

“And what makes you think I’m doing any such investigation?”

“Don’t waste my time, Dragan.” Armansky sighed. “You’re right.”

“I want you to come and see me,” Palmgren said. “I can come this weekend.”

“Not good enough. I want you to come tonight. We have a great deal to discuss.”

Blomkvist had made himself coffee and a sandwich in Salander’s kitchen. He half hoped to hear her keys in the door. But he was not optimistic. The empty hard drive in her PowerBook told him that she had already left her hideout for good. He had found her apartment too late.

At 2:30 in the afternoon he was still sitting at Salander’s desk. He had read Björck’s “non-report” three times. It had been formulated as a memo to an unnamed superior. The recommendation was simple: get a pliable psychiatrist who would admit Salander to the children’s psychiatric clinic. The girl was disturbed, as was clearly demonstrated by her behaviour.

Blomkvist was going to devote very particular attention to Björck and Teleborian in the coming days. He was looking forward to it. His mobile rang and interrupted his train of thought.

“Hi again. It’s Malin. I think I’ve got something.”

“What?”

“There’s no Ronald Niedermann in the social security records in Sweden. He’s not in any telephone book or tax records or on the vehicle licencing database, or anywhere else. But listen to this. In 1998 a corporation was registered with the Patent Office. It’s called KAB Import AB and has a P.O. box address in Göteborg. The company imports electronics. The chairman of the board is Karl Axel Bodin, hence KAB, born in 1941.”

“It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Not for me either. There’s also an accountant on the board who’s registered at a couple of dozen other companies. He seems to be one of those nominal finance directors that small companies need. The company has been more or less dormant since it was set up. But then the third member of the board is an R. Niedermann. He doesn’t have a social security number in Sweden. He was born on January 18, 1970, and is listed as the company’s representative in the German market.”

“Good work, Malin. Very good. Do we have an address apart from the P.O. box?”

“No, but I’ve tracked down Karl Axel Bodin. He’s registered in West Sweden and lives at the address for P.O. box 612 in Gosseberga. I looked it up; it seems to be a property in the country not far from Nossebro, northeast of Göteborg.”

“What do we know about him?”

“He declared an income of 260,000 kronor two years ago. According to our friend on the police force, he has no criminal record. He has a licence for a moose rifle and a shotgun. He has two cars, a Ford and a Saab, both older models. No points on his licence. He’s unmarried and calls himself a farmer.”

“A man about whom we know nothing, who has no police record.” Blomkvist thought for a few moments. He had to make a decision.

“One more thing. Dragan Armansky called several times looking for you.”

“Thanks, Malin. I’ll call you later.”

“Mikael… is everything OK with you?”

“No, everything isn’t OK, but I’ll be in touch.”

As a good citizen he ought to call Bublanski. If he did, he would either have to tell him the truth about Salander or end up in a muddled situation of half-truths and withheld facts. But that was not the real problem.

Salander was out looking for Niedermann and Zalachenko. He had no idea how far she had gotten, but if he and Eriksson could find an address for P.O. box 612 in Gosseberga, there was no doubt that Salander could too. It was very likely that she was heading to Gosseberga. That was the natural next step.

If he called the police and told them where Niedermann was hiding, he’d have to tell them that Salander was probably on her way there. She was being sought for three murders and the shooting in Stallarholmen, which would mean that the national armed response team or some equivalent would be tasked with taking her in.

And Salander would no doubt put up a violent resistance.

Blomkvist got a pen and paper and made a list of things he could not or would not want to tell the police.

First the address in Mosebacke.

Salander had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure the privacy of her apartment. This was where she had her life and her secrets. He was not going to give her away.

Then he wrote Bjurman and added a question mark after the name.

He glanced at the DVD on the desk. Bjurman had raped Salander. He had nearly killed her. He had outrageously abused his position as her guardian. He should be exposed for the swine he was. But there was an ethical dilemma here. Salander had not told the police. Did she want to be exposed in the media by a police investigation in which the most harrowing, intimate details would be leaked in a matter of hours? The DVD was proof, and stills from it would probably end up in the evening papers.

It was up to Salander to decide how she wanted to proceed. But if he had been able to track down her apartment, sooner or later the police would do so too. He put the DVD in his bag.

Then he wrote Björck’s report. In 1991 it had been stamped top secret. It shed light on everything that had happened. It named Zalachenko and made clear Björck’s role, and together with the list of johns from Svensson’s computer it would give Björck some anxious hours facing Bublanski. And in light of the correspondence, Teleborian would find himself in deep shit too.

The documents would lead the police to Gosseberga, but at least he would have a head start.

He started Word and wrote in outline form the key facts he had discovered during the past twenty-four hours from his conversations with Björck and Palmgren, and from the material he had found at Salander’s place. It took him about an hour. He burned the document onto a CD along with his own research.

He wondered whether he ought to check in with Armansky, but thought the hell with it. He had enough balls to juggle already.

Blomkvist walked into Millennium and went straight to Berger’s office.

“His name is Zalachenko,” he said without even saying hello. “He’s a former Soviet hit man from one of the intelligence services. He defected in 1976 and was granted asylum in Sweden and given a salary by Säpo. After the end of the Soviet Union he became, like many others, a full-time gangster. Now he’s involved in sex trafficking and smuggling weapons and drugs.”

Berger put down her pen. “Why am I not surprised that the KGB is popping up in the action?”

“It’s not the KGB. It’s the GRU. The military intelligence service.”

“So it’s serious.”

Blomkvist nodded.

“You mean he’s the one who murdered Dag and Mia?”

“It wasn’t him, no. He sent someone. Ronald Niedermann, the monster that Malin has been finding out about.”

“Can you prove this?”

“More or less. Some of it is guesswork. But Bjurman was murdered because he asked Zalachenko for help in dealing with Lisbeth.”

Blomkvist told her about the DVD Salander had left in her desk.

“Zalachenko is her father. Bjurman worked formally for Säpo in the mid-seventies and was one of those who made Zalachenko officially welcome when he defected. Later Bjurman became a lawyer with his own practice and a full-time crook, doing jobs for an elite group within the Security Police. I would think there’s an inner circle that meets now and then in the men’s sauna to control the world and keep the secret about Zalachenko. I’m guessing that the rest of Säpo has never even heard of the bastard. Lisbeth threatened to crack the secret wide open. So they locked her up in a children’s psychiatric unit.”

“That can’t be true.”

“Oh, but it is,” Blomkvist said. “Lisbeth wasn’t especially manageable then, nor is she now… but since she was twelve years old she’s been a threat to national security.”

He gave her a summary of the story.

“This is quite a bit to digest,” Berger said. “And Dag and Mia…”

“Were murdered because Dag discovered the link between Bjurman and Zalachenko.”

“So what happens now? We have to tell the police, don’t we?”

“Parts of it, but not all. I’ve copied the significant information onto this disk as backup, just in case. Lisbeth is looking for Zalachenko. I’m going to try to find her. Nothing of this must be shared with anybody.”

“Mikael… I don’t like this. We can’t withhold information in a murder investigation.”

“And we’re not going to. I intend to call Bublanski. But my guess is that Lisbeth is on her way to Gosseberga. She’s still being sought for three murders, and if we call the police they’ll unleash their armed response team and backup weapons with hunting ammunition, and there’s a real risk that she would resist arrest. And then anything could happen.” He stopped and smiled grimly. “If nothing else, we ought to keep the police out of it so that the armed response team doesn’t come to a sticky end. I have to find her first.”

Berger looked dubious.

“I don’t intend to reveal Lisbeth’s secrets. Bublanski will have to figure those out for himself. I want you to do me a favour. This folder contains Björck’s report from 1991 and some correspondence between Björck and Teleborian. I want you to make a copy and offer it to Bublanski or Modig. I’m leaving for Göteborg in twenty minutes.”

“Mikael…”

“I know. But I’m on Lisbeth’s side through it all.”

Berger pressed her lips together and said nothing. Then she nodded.

“Be careful,” she said, but he had already left.

I should go with him, she thought. That was the only decent thing to do. But she still hadn’t told him that she was going to leave Millennium and that it was all over, no matter what happened. She took the folder and headed for the photocopier.

The box was in a post office in a shopping centre. Salander didn’t know Göteborg, nor where in the city she was, but she found the post office and positioned herself in a café where she could keep watch on the box through a gap in a window where there was a poster advertising the Svensk Kassatjänst, the improved Swedish postal system.

Irene Nesser wore more discreet makeup than Lisbeth Salander. She had some silly necklaces on and was reading Crime and Punishment, which she had found in a bookshop one street away. She took her time, occasionally turning a page. She’d begun her surveillance at lunch time and had no idea whether anyone came regularly to pick up the mail, whether it might be daily or every other week, whether it had already been collected earlier in the day, or whether anyone ever turned up at all. But it was her only lead, and she drank a caffè latte while she waited.

She was about to doze off when she suddenly saw the door to the box being opened. She glanced at the clock. A quarter to two. Lucky as shit.

She got up quickly and walked over to the window, where she spotted someone in a black leather jacket leaving the area where the boxes were. She caught up with him on the street outside. He was a thin young man in his twenties. He walked round the corner to a Renault and unlocked the door. Salander memorized the licence plate number and ran back to her Corolla, which was parked only a hundred yards away on the same street. She caught up with the car as it turned onto Linnégatan. She followed him down Avenyn and up towards Nordstan.

Blomkvist arrived at Central Station in time to catch the X2000 train at 5:10 p.m. He bought a ticket on board with his credit card, took a seat in the restaurant car, and ordered a late lunch.

He felt a gnawing uneasiness in the pit of his stomach and was afraid he had set off too late. He prayed that Salander would call him, but he knew that she wouldn’t.

She had done her best to kill Zalachenko in 1991. Now, after all these years, he had struck back.

Palmgren had delivered a prescient analysis. Salander had experienced personally that it was no use talking to the authorities.

Blomkvist glanced at his laptop bag. He had brought along the Colt that he’d found in her desk. He wasn’t sure why he had taken the gun, but he’d felt instinctively that he must not leave it in her apartment. He knew that wasn’t much of a logical argument.

As the train rolled across Årstabron he flipped open his mobile and called Bublanski.

“What do you want?” Bublanski said, obviously annoyed.

“To tie up loose ends,” Blomkvist said.

“Loose ends of what?”

“This whole mess. Do you want to know who murdered Svensson, Johansson, and Bjurman?”

“If you have information I’d like to hear it.”

“The murderer’s name is Ronald Niedermann. That’s the giant who boxed with Paolo Roberto. He’s a German citizen, thirty-five years old, and he works for a scumbag named Alexander Zalachenko, also known as Zala.”

Bublanski said nothing for a long time, and then Blomkvist heard him sigh, turn over a sheet of paper, and click his ballpoint.

“And you’re sure about this?”

“Yes.”

“OK. So where are Niedermann and this Zalachenko?”

“I don’t know yet. But as soon as I work it out I’ll let you know. In a little while Erika Berger will deliver to you a police report from 1991. In it you’ll find all sorts of information about Zalachenko and Salander.”

“Like what?”

“That Zalachenko is Lisbeth’s father, for example. That he’s a hit man who defected from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”

“A Russian hit man?” Bublanski echoed.

“A faction within Säpo has been supporting him and concealing his criminal dealings.”

Blomkvist heard Bublanski pull up a chair and sit down.

“I think it would be best if you came in and made a formal statement.”

“I don’t have time for that. I’m sorry.”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m not in Stockholm at the moment. But I’ll send word as soon as I find Zalachenko.”

“Blomkvist… You don’t have to prove anything. I have doubts about Salander’s guilt too.”

“But I’m just a simple private investigator who doesn’t know the first thing about police work.”

It was childish, he knew, but he disconnected without waiting for Bublanski’s reply. Instead he called Annika Giannini.

“Hi, Sis.”

“Hi. Anything new?”

“I might be needing a good lawyer tomorrow.”

“What have you done?”

“Nothing too serious yet, but I might be arrested for obstructing a police investigation. But that’s not why I called. You couldn’t represent me anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because I want you to take on the defence of Lisbeth Salander, and you can’t look after both of us.”

Blomkvist gave her a rapid rundown of the story. Giannini was ominously silent. Finally she said, “And you have documentation of all this…”

“I do.”

“I’d have to think it over. Lisbeth really needs a criminal lawyer.”

“You’d be perfect.”

“Micke…”

“Listen, you were the one who was furious with me because I didn’t ask for help when I needed it.”

When they’d finished their conversation, Blomkvist sat thinking. Then he picked up his mobile and called Holger Palmgren. He didn’t have any particular reason for doing so, but he wanted to tell him that he was following up one or two leads, and that he hoped the whole story would be resolved within the next few hours.

The problem was that Salander had leads too.

Salander reached for an apple in her backpack without taking her eyes off the farm. She lay stretched out at the edge of the woods with a floor mat from the Corolla as a groundsheet. She had taken off her wig and changed into green tracksuit pants with pockets, a thick sweater, and a midlength windbreaker with a thermal lining.

Gosseberga Farm lay about four hundred yards from the road. There were four buildings. The main building was about a hundred and twenty yards in front of her, an ordinary white-frame house on two floors, with a shed and a barn seventy yards beyond the farmhouse. Through the barn door she could see the front of a white car. She thought it was a Volvo, but it was too far away for her to be sure.

Between her and the main building there was a muddy field that extended to the right about two hundred yards down towards a pond. The driveway cut through the field and disappeared into a small stand of trees towards the road. Next to the road there was another farmhouse that looked to be abandoned; the windows were covered with plastic sheeting. Beyond the main building was a grove of trees that served to block the view of the nearest neighbour, a clump of buildings almost six hundred yards away. So the farm in front of her was relatively isolated.

She was close to Lake Anten in an area of rounded glacial moraines where fields alternated with small communities and dense woodland. The road map gave no detail, but she had followed the black Renault from Göteborg along the E20 and turned west towards Sollebrunn in Alingsås district. After about forty minutes the car made a sharp turn onto a forest road at a sign that said GOSSEBERGA. She had driven on and parked behind a barn in a clump of trees about a hundred yards north of the access road, then returned on foot.

She had never heard of Gosseberga, but as far as she could tell the name referred to the house and barn in front of her. She had passed the mailbox on the road. Painted on it was P.O. BOX 192 – K.A.BODIN. The name meant nothing to her.

She had made a wide circuit of the buildings and finally selected her lookout spot. She had the afternoon sun at her back. Since she’d gotten into position at around 3:30, only one thing had happened. At 4:00 the driver of the Renault came out of the house. He exchanged some words in the doorway with someone she could not see. Then he drove away and did not come back. Otherwise she had seen no movement at the farm. She waited patiently and watched the building through a pair of Minolta 8x binoculars.

Blomkvist drummed his fingers in annoyance on the tabletop in the restaurant car. The X2000 had stopped in Katrineholm and had been standing there for almost an hour. There was some malfunction in one of the carriages that had to be fixed. An announcement apologized for the delay.

He sighed in frustration and ordered more coffee. At last, fifteen minutes later, the train started up with a jerk. He looked at his watch. 8:00 p.m.

He should have taken a plane or rented a car.

He was now even more troubled by the feeling that he had started too late.

At around 6:00 p.m. someone had turned on a lamp in a room on the ground floor, and shortly after that an oil lamp was lit. Salander glimpsed shadows in what she imagined was the kitchen, to the right of the front door, but she could not make out any faces.

Then the front door opened and the giant named Ronald Niedermann came out. He wore dark trousers and a tight T-shirt that emphasized his muscles. She had been right. She saw once more that Niedermann really was massive. But he was flesh and blood like everyone else, no matter what Paolo Roberto and Miriam Wu had been through. Niedermann walked around the house and went into the barn where the car was parked. He came out with a small bag and went back inside the house.

After only a few minutes he appeared again. He was accompanied by a short, thin older man who was using a crutch. It was too dark for Salander to make out his features, but she felt an icy chill creep along the back of her neck.

Daaaddyyy, I’m heeeere…

She watched Zalachenko and Niedermann as they walked up the road. They stopped at the shed, where Niedermann collected some firewood. Then they went back to the house and closed the door.

Salander lay still for several minutes. Then she lowered her binoculars and retreated until she was completely concealed among the trees. She opened her backpack, took out a thermos, and poured some coffee. She put a lump of sugar in her mouth and began to suck on it. She ate a cheese sandwich she had bought earlier in the day on the way to Göteborg. As she ate she thought about the situation.

After she had finished she took out Nieminen’s Polish P-83 Wanad. She ejected the magazine and checked that nothing was blocking the bolt or the bore. She did a blind fire. She had six rounds of 9 mm Makarov. That should be enough. She shoved the magazine back in place and chambered a round. She put the safety catch on and slipped the weapon into her right-hand jacket pocket.

Salander began her advance towards the house, moving in a circle through the woods. She had gone about a hundred and fifty yards when suddenly she stopped in mid-stride.

In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, Pierre de Fermat had jotted the words I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

The square had been converted to a cube, (x³ + y³ = z³), and mathematicians had spent centuries looking for the answer to Fermat’s riddle. By the time Andrew Wiles solved the puzzle in the 1990s, he had been at it for ten years using the world’s most advanced computer programme.

And all of a sudden she understood. The answer was so disarmingly simple. A game with numbers that lined up and then fell into place in a simple formula that was most similar to a rebus.

Fermat had no computer, of course, and Wiles’ solution was based on mathematics that had not been invented when Fermat formulated his theorem. Fermat would never have been able to produce the proof that Wiles had presented. Fermat’s solution was quite different.

She was so stunned that she had to sit down on a tree stump. She gazed straight ahead as she checked the equation.

So that’s what he meant. No wonder mathematicians were tearing out their hair.

Then she giggled.

A philosopher would have had a better chance of solving this riddle.

She wished she could have known Fermat.

He was a cocky devil.

After a while she stood up and continued her approach through the trees. She kept the barn between her and the house.

CHAPTER 31

Salander got into the barn through the outside hatch to an old manure drain. There were no livestock. She saw that the barn contained three cars – the white Volvo from Auto-Expert, an old Ford, and a somewhat newer Saab. Further in was a rusty harrow and other tools from the days when this had been a working farm.

She lingered in the darkness of the barn and watched the house. It was dusk and the lights were on in all the rooms on the ground floor. She couldn’t see any movement, but she thought she saw the flickering glow of a television set. She glanced at her watch. 7:30. Time for Rapport.

She was surprised that Zalachenko would have chosen to live in such an isolated place. It was not like the man she remembered. She would never have expected to find him out in the country in a little white farmhouse. In some anonymous villa community, maybe, or in a vacation spot abroad. He must have made more enemies even than Salander herself. She was troubled that the place looked so undefended. But she had no doubt that he had weapons in the house.

After lingering for a long time, she slipped out of the barn into the twilight. She hurried across the yard, keeping her step light and her back to the facade of the house. Then she heard the faint sound of music. She walked noiselessly around the house and tried to peer through the windows, but they were too high.

Salander was instinctively uneasy. For the first half of her life she had lived in fear of the man inside that house. During the second half, ever since she had failed in her attempt to kill him, she had waited for the moment when he would come back into her life. This time she wasn’t going to make any mistakes.

Zalachenko might be an old cripple, but he was a trained assassin who had survived on more than one field of battle. Besides, there was Ronald Niedermann to take into account. She would have much preferred to surprise Zalachenko outdoors, where he would be unprotected. She had no wish to talk to him and would have been satisfied with a rifle and a telescopic lens. But she had no rifle, and it was unlikely that he’d be taking an evening stroll. If she wanted to wait for a better opportunity, she would have to withdraw and spend the night in the woods. She had no sleeping bag, and even though the evening was mild, the night would be cold. Now that she had him within reach, she didn’t want to risk letting him slip away again. She thought about Miriam Wu and about her mother.

She would have to get inside the house, but that was the worst possible scenario. Sure, she could knock on the door and fire her gun as soon as the door opened, and then go in to find the other bastard. But whoever was left would be alerted, and he would probably be armed. Time for a risk assessment. What were the options?

She caught sight of Niedermann’s profile as he walked past a window only a few yards from her. He was saying something over his shoulder to someone.

Both of them were in the room to the left of the front door.

Salander made up her mind. She took the pistol out of her jacket pocket, clicked off the safety, and moved silently onto the porch. She held the gun in her left hand as she pressed the front door handle down with excruciating caution. It was unlocked. She frowned and hesitated. The door had double dead bolts.

Zalachenko should not have left the door unlocked. It was giving her goose bumps on the back of her neck.

It felt wrong.

The hallway was black as pitch. To the right she glimpsed the stairs to the upper floor. There were two doors straight ahead and one to the left. Light was seeping through a crack above the door. She stood still and listened. Then she heard a voice and the scraping of a chair in the room to the left.

She took two swift steps and threw open the door and aimed her gun at… the room was empty.

She heard the rustle of clothing behind her and spun around like a lizard. As she tried to raise the gun to firing position, one of Niedermann’s enormous hands closed like an iron vise around her neck and the other clamped around her gun hand. He held her by the neck and lifted her straight up in the air as if she were a doll.

For a moment she kicked her feet in midair. Then she twisted around and kicked at Niedermann’s crotch. She hit his hip instead. It felt like kicking a tree trunk. Her vision was going black as he squeezed her neck and she felt herself drop the gun.

Fuckers.

Then Niedermann threw her across the room. She landed on a sofa with a crash and slid to the floor. She felt blood rushing to her head and staggered to her feet. She saw a heavy glass ashtray on a table and grabbed it and tried to fling it backhand. Niedermann caught her arm in mid-swing. She reached into her left pants pocket with her free hand and pulled out the Taser, twisting around to shove it into Niedermann’s crotch.

She felt a hefty jolt from the electric shock come through the arm Niedermann was holding her with. She had expected him to collapse in pain. Instead he looked down at her with a surprised expression. Salander’s eyes widened in alarm. He seemed to experience some unpleasantness, but if he felt any pain he ignored it. This man is not normal.

Niedermann bent and took the Taser from her and examined it with a puzzled look. Then he slapped her across the head. It was like being hit with a club. She tumbled to the floor next to the sofa. She looked up and saw that Niedermann was watching her curiously, as if wondering what her next move would be. Like a cat getting ready to play with its prey.

Then she sensed a movement in the doorway. She turned her head.

He came slowly into the light.

He was leaning on a forearm crutch and she could see a prosthesis sticking out from his pants leg. There were two fingers missing from his left hand.

She raised her eyes to his face. The left half was a patchwork of scar tissue. His ear was a little stump and he had no eyebrows. He was bald. She remembered him as a virile and athletic man with wavy black hair. Now he was about five foot four, and emaciated.

“Hello, Pappa,” she said tonelessly.

Alexander Zalachenko regarded his daughter without expression.

Niedermann turned on the ceiling light. He checked that she had no more weapons by running his hands over her clothes and then clicked the safety on the P-83 Wanad and released the magazine. Zalachenko shuffled past them, sat in an armchair, and picked up a remote control.

Salander’s eyes fell on the TV behind him. Zalachenko pressed the remote, and she saw a green flickering image of the area behind the barn and part of the driveway to the house. Infrared camera. They had known she was coming.

“I was beginning to think that you wouldn’t dare to make an approach,” Zalachenko said. “We’ve been watching you since 4:00. You tripped just about every alarm around the farm.”

“Motion detectors,” Salander said.

“Two by the road and four in the clearing on the other side of the field. You set up your observation post on precisely the spot where we’d positioned alarms. It’s the best view of the farm. Usually it’s moose or deer, and sometimes berry-pickers who come too close. But we don’t often get to see somebody sneak up to the front door with a gun in their hand.” He paused for a moment. “Did you really think Zalachenko would sit in his little house in the country completely unprotected?”

Salander massaged the back of her neck and began to get up.

“Stay there on the floor,” Zalachenko said.

Niedermann stopped fiddling with the gun and watched her quietly. He raised an eyebrow and smiled at her. Salander remembered Paolo Roberto’s battered face on TV and decided it would be a good idea to stay on the floor. She breathed out and leaned back against the sofa.

Zalachenko held out his intact right hand. Niedermann pulled a weapon out of his waistband, cocked it, and gave it to him. Salander noticed that it was a Sig Sauer, standard police issue. Zalachenko nodded, and Niedermann turned away and put on a jacket. He left the room and Salander heard the front door open and close.

“In case you get any stupid ideas, if you even try to get up I’ll shoot you right in the gut.”

Salander relaxed. He might manage to get off two, maybe three shots before she could reach him, and he was probably using ammo that would make her bleed to death in a few minutes.

“You look like shit,” Zalachenko said. “Like a fucking whore. But you’ve got my eyes.”

“Does it hurt?” she asked, nodding at his prosthesis.

Zalachenko looked at her for a long time. “No. Not anymore.”

Salander stared at him.

“You’d really like to kill me, wouldn’t you?” he said.

She said nothing. He laughed.

“I’ve thought about you over the years. In fact almost every time I look in the mirror.”

“You should have left my mother alone.”

“Your mother was a whore.”

Salander’s eyes turned black as coal. “She was no whore. She worked as a cashier in a supermarket and tried to make ends meet.”

Zalachenko laughed again. “You can have whatever fantasies you want about her. But I know that she was a whore. And she made sure to get pregnant right away and then tried to get me to marry her. As if I’d marry a whore.”

Salander looked down the barrel of the gun and hoped he would relax his concentration for an instant.

“The firebomb was sneaky. I hated you for that. But in time it didn’t matter. You weren’t worth the energy. If you’d only let things be.”

“Bullshit. Bjurman asked you to fix me.”

“That was another thing entirely. He needed a film that you have, so I made a little business deal.”

“And you thought I’d give the film to you.”

“Yes, my dear daughter. I’m convinced that you would have. You have no idea how cooperative people can be when Ronald asks for something. And especially when he starts up a chain saw and saws off one of your feet. In this case it would have been appropriate compensation – a foot for a foot.”

Salander thought about Miriam at the hands of Niedermann in the warehouse. Zalachenko misinterpreted her expression.

“You don’t have to worry. We don’t intend to cut you up. But tell me: did Bjurman rape you?”

She said nothing.

“Damn, what appalling taste he must have had. I read in the paper that you’re some sort of fucking dyke. That’s no surprise. There can’t be a man who’d want you.”

Salander still said nothing.

“Maybe I should ask Niedermann to screw you. You look as if you need it.” He thought about it. “Although Ronald doesn’t have sex with girls. He’s not a fairy. He just doesn’t have sex.”

“Then maybe you should screw me,” Salander said to provoke him.

Come closer. Make a mistake.

“No, thanks all the same. That would be perverse.”

They were silent for a moment.

“What are we waiting for?” Salander asked.

“My companion is coming right back. He just had to move his car and run a little errand. Where’s your sister?”

Salander shrugged.

“Answer me.”

“I don’t know and I honestly don’t give a shit.”

He laughed again. “Sisterly love, eh? Camilla was always the one with the brains – you were just worthless filth. But I have to admit it’s quite satisfying to see you again up close.”

“Zalachenko,” she said, “you’re a tiresome fuck. Was it Niedermann who shot Bjurman?”

“Naturally. Ronald is the perfect soldier. He not only obeys orders, he also takes his own initiative when necessary.”

“Where did you dig him up?”

Zalachenko gave his daughter a peculiar look. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but decided against it. He glanced at the front door and then smiled at Salander.

“You mean you haven’t worked it out yet?” he said. “According to Bjurman you’re supposed to be a good researcher.” Then Zalachenko roared with laughter. “We used to hang out together in Spain in the early nineties when I was convalescing from your little firebomb. He was twenty-two and became my arms and legs. He isn’t an employee… it’s a partnership. We have a flourishing business.”

“Sex trafficking.”

“You could say that we’ve diversified and deal with many different goods and services. Our business model is to stay in the background and never be seen. But you must have worked out who Ronald is.”

Salander did not know what he was getting at.

“He’s your brother,” Zalachenko said.

“No,” Salander said, breathless.

Zalachenko laughed again. But the barrel of the pistol was still pointed unnervingly at her.

“Well, I should say he’s your half brother,” Zalachenko said. “The result of a brief diversion during an assignment I had in Germany in 1969.”

“You’ve turned your son into a murderer.”

“Oh no, I’ve only helped him realize his potential. He had the ability to kill long before I took over his training. And he’s going to run the family business long after I’m gone.”

“Does he know that we’re half siblings?”

“Of course. But if you think you can appeal to his brotherly love, forget it. I’m his family. You’re just a buzz on the horizon. And he isn’t your only sibling. You have at least four more brothers and three sisters in various countries. One of your other brothers is an idiot, but another actually has potential. He runs the Tallinn arm of the business. But Ronald is the only one who really lives up to the Zalachenko genes.”

“I don’t suppose my sisters will get a role in the family business.”

Zalachenko looked startled at the suggestion.

“Zalachenko… you’re just an ordinary asshole who hates women. Why did you kill Bjurman?”

“Bjurman was a moron. He couldn’t believe it when he learned you were my daughter. He was one of the few people in this country who knew about my background. I have to admit that it made me nervous when he contacted me out of the blue, but then everything turned out for the best. He died and you got the blame.”

“But why shoot him?”

“Well, it wasn’t really planned. It’s always useful to have a back door into Säpo. Even if I haven’t needed one for years. And even if he’s a moron. But that journalist in Enskede had somehow found a connection between him and me and called him just as Ronald was at his apartment. Bjurman panicked, went berserk. Ronald had to make a decision on the spot. He acted quite correctly.”

Salander’s heart sank like a stone when her father confirmed what she had already suspected. Svensson had found a connection. She had talked to Svensson and Johansson for more than an hour. She’d liked the woman immediately but was a little cooler towards the journalist. He reminded her too much of Blomkvist – an insufferable do-gooder who thought he could change everything with a book. But she had recognized his honest intentions.

It turned out that her visit had been a waste of time. They couldn’t point her to Zalachenko. Svensson had found his name and started digging, but he wasn’t able to identify him.

Instead, she had made a devastating mistake. She knew that there had to be a connection between Bjurman and Zalachenko, and she asked questions about Bjurman in an attempt to ascertain whether Svensson had come across his name. He hadn’t, but his suspicions were instantly aroused. He zeroed right in on Bjurman and plied her with questions.

She gave him very little, but he had understood that Salander was a player in the drama. He also realized that he had information she wanted. They had agreed to meet again for further discussions after Easter. Then Salander had gone home to bed. When she woke up the next morning, she was greeted by the news that two people had been murdered in an apartment in Enskede.

She had given Svensson only one piece of usable information: the name Nils Bjurman. He must have called Bjurman the minute she left the apartment.

And she was the link. If she hadn’t visited Svensson, he and Johansson would still be alive.

Zalachenko said: “You have no idea how surprised we were when the police started hunting you for the murders.”

Salander bit her lip.

Zalachenko scrutinized her. “How did you find me?” he said.

She shrugged.

“Lisbeth… Ronald is coming back soon. I can tell him to break the bones in your body one by one until you answer. Save us the trouble.”

“The P.O. box. I traced Niedermann’s car from the rental agency and waited until that pimply shit showed up and emptied the box.”

“Aha. So simple. Thanks. I’ll remember that.”

The muzzle of the pistol was still pointing at her chest.

“Do you really think this is going to blow over?” Salander said. “You’ve made too many mistakes. The police are going to identify you.”

“I know. Björck called yesterday and told me that a journalist from Millennium has been sniffing around and that it was just a matter of time. It’s possible that we’ll have to do something about that.”

“It’ll be a long list,” Salander said. “Mikael Blomkvist and Erika Berger, the editor in chief, the managing editor, and half a dozen others at Millennium alone. And then you have Dragan Armansky and some of his staff at Milton Security. And Detective Inspector Bublanski and everyone involved in the investigation. How many people would you have to kill to cover this up? No, they’re going to get to you.”

Zalachenko gave her a horrible twisted smile.

“So what? I haven’t shot anybody, and there isn’t one shred of forensic evidence against me. They can identify whoever the hell they want. Believe me… they can search this house from top to bottom and they won’t find so much as a speck of dust that could connect me to any criminal activity. It was Säpo who locked you up in the asylum, not me, and it won’t take much for them to put all the papers on the table.”

“Niedermann,” Lisbeth reminded him.

“Early tomorrow morning Ronald is going on vacation abroad for a while and he’ll wait out whatever develops.”

Zalachenko gave Salander a triumphant look.

“You’re still going to be the prime suspect. So it’s best if you just disappear.”

It was almost an hour before Niedermann returned. He was wearing boots.

Salander glanced at the man who according to her father was her half brother. She couldn’t see the slightest resemblance. In fact, he was her diametrical opposite. But she felt very strongly that there was something wrong with Niedermann. His build, the weak face, and the voice that hadn’t really broken – they all seemed like genetic defects of some sort. He had evidently been insensitive to the Taser, and his hands were enormous. Nothing about Ronald Niedermann seemed quite normal.

There are all sorts of genetic defects in the Zalachenko family, she thought bitterly.

“Ready?” Zalachenko asked.

Niedermann nodded. He held out his hand for the Sig Sauer.

“I’ll come with you,” Zalachenko said.

Niedermann hesitated. “It’s quite a walk.”

“I’ll come anyway. Get my jacket.”

Niedermann shrugged and did as he was told. Zalachenko put on his jacket and vanished into the next room for a while. Salander watched as Niedermann screwed what appeared to be a homemade silencer onto the gun.

“All right, let’s go,” Zalachenko said from the door.

Niedermann bent and pulled Salander to her feet. She looked him in the eye.

“I’m going to kill you too,” she said.

“You’re very sure of yourself. I’ll say that for you,” her father said.

Niedermann smiled mildly and then pushed her towards the front door and out into the yard. He kept a firm grip on the back of her neck. His fingers could reach almost all the way around it. He steered her towards the woods beyond the barn.

They moved slowly and Niedermann stopped occasionally to let Zalachenko catch up. They both had powerful flashlights. When they reached the edge of the woods Niedermann let go of Salander’s neck. He kept the pistol trained on her back.

They followed a difficult path for about four hundred yards. Salander stumbled twice, but each time was lifted to her feet.

“Turn right here,” Niedermann said.

After about fifty feet they came into a clearing. Lisbeth saw a hole in the ground. In the beam of Niedermann’s flashlight she saw a spade stuck in a mound of soil. Then she understood Niedermann’s assignment. He pushed her towards the hole and she tripped and went down on all fours with her hands buried deep in the sandy earth. She got up and gave him an expressionless look. Zalachenko was taking his time, and Niedermann waited patiently. The muzzle of the pistol was unswervingly aimed at her chest.

Zalachenko was out of breath. It was more than a minute before he could speak.

“I ought to say something, but I don’t think I have anything to say to you,” he said.

“That’s fine by me,” Salander said. “I don’t have much to say to you either.” She gave him a lopsided smile.

“Let’s get it over with,” Zalachenko said.

“I’m glad that my very last act was to have you locked away forever,” Salander said. “The police will be here tonight.”

“Bullshit. I was expecting you to try a bluff. You came here to kill me and nothing else. You didn’t say anything to anybody.”

Salander’s smile broadened. She suddenly looked malevolent.

“May I show you something, Pappa?”

Slowly she reached into her left-hand pants pocket and took out a rectangular object. Niedermann watched her every move.

“Every word you’ve said in the past hour has been broadcast over Internet radio.”

She held up her Palm Tungsten T3 computer.

Zalachenko’s brow furrowed where his eyebrows should have been.

“Let’s see that,” he said, holding out his good hand.

Salander lobbed the PDA to him. He caught it in midair.

“Bullshit,” Zalachenko said. “This is an ordinary Palm.”

As Niedermann bent to look at her computer, Salander flung a fistful of sand right into his eyes. He was blinded, but instinctively fired a round from his pistol. Salander had already moved two steps to one side and the bullet only tore a hole through the air where she had been standing. She grabbed the spade and swung it at his gun hand. She hit him with the sharp edge full force across the knuckles and saw his Sig Sauer fly in a wide arc away from them and into some bushes. Blood spurted from a gash above his index finger.

He should be screaming with pain.

Niedermann fumbled with his wounded hand as he desperately tried to rub his eyes with the other. Her only chance to win this fight was to cause him massive damage, and as quickly as possible. If it came down to a physical contest she was hopelessly lost. She needed five seconds to make it into the woods. She swung the spade back over her shoulder and tried to twist the handle so that the edge would hit first, but she was in the wrong position. The flat side of the spade smacked into Niedermann’s face.

Niedermann grunted as his nose broke for the second time in a matter of days. He was still blinded by the sand, but he swung his right arm and managed to shove Salander away from him. She stumbled over a tree root. For a second she was down on the ground but sprang instantly to her feet. Niedermann was briefly out of action.

I’m going to make it.

She took two steps towards the undergrowth when out of the corner of her eye-click-she saw Zalachenko raise his arm.

The fucking old man has a gun too.

The realization cracked like a whip through her mind.

She changed direction in the same instant the shot was fired. The bullet struck the outside of her hip and made her spin off balance.

She felt no pain.

The second bullet hit her in the back and stopped against her left shoulder blade. A paralyzing pain sliced through her body.

She went down on her knees. For a few seconds she could not move. She was conscious that Zalachenko was behind her, about twenty feet away. With one last surge of energy she stubbornly hurled herself to her feet and took a wobbly step towards the cover of the bushes.

Zalachenko had time to aim.

The third bullet caught her about an inch below the top of her left ear. It penetrated her skull and caused a spiderweb of radial cracks in her cranium. The lead came to rest in the grey matter about two inches beneath the cerebral cortex, by the cerebrum.

For Salander the medical detail was academic. The bullet caused immediate massive trauma. Her last sensation was a glowing red shock that turned into a white light.

Then darkness.

Click.

Zalachenko tried to fire one more round, but his hands were shaking so hard that he couldn’t aim. She almost got away. And then he realized that she was dead and he lowered his weapon, shivering as the adrenaline flowed through his body. He looked down at his gun. He had considered leaving it behind, but had gone to get it and put it in his jacket pocket as though he needed a mascot. A monster. They were two fully grown men, and one of them was Ronald Niedermann, who had been armed with his Sig Sauer. And that fucking whore almost got away.

He glanced at his daughter’s body. In the beam from his flashlight she looked like a bloody rag doll. He clicked the safety catch on and stuffed the pistol into his jacket pocket and went over to Niedermann, who was standing helpless, tears running from his dirt-filled eyes and blood from his hand and nose. “I think I broke my nose again,” he said.

“Idiot,” Zalachenko said. “She almost got away.”

Niedermann kept rubbing his eyes. They didn’t hurt, but the tears were flowing and he could scarcely see.

“Stand up straight, damn it.” Zalachenko shook his head in contempt. “What the hell would you do without me?”

Niedermann blinked in despair. Zalachenko limped over to his daughter’s body and grabbed her jacket by the collar. He dragged her to the grave that was only a hole in the ground, too small even for Salander to lie stretched out. He lifted the body so that her feet were over the opening and let her tumble in. She landed facedown in a fetal position, her legs bent under her.

“Fill it in so we can go home,” Zalachenko commanded.

It took the half-blind Niedermann a while to shovel the soil in around her. What was left over he spread out around the clearing with powerful jabs of the spade.

Zalachenko smoked a cigarette as he watched Niedermann work. He was still shivering, but the adrenaline had begun to subside. He felt a sudden relief that she was gone. He could still picture her eyes as she threw the firebomb all those many years ago.

It was 9:30 when Zalachenko shone his flashlight around and declared himself satisfied. It took a while longer to find the Sig Sauer in the undergrowth. Then they went back to the house. Zalachenko was feeling wonderfully gratified. He tended to Niedermann’s hand. The spade had cut deep and he had to find a needle and thread to sew up the wound – a skill he had learned in military school in Novosibirsk as a fifteen-year-old. At least he didn’t need to administer an anaesthetic. But it was possible that the wound was sufficiently serious for Niedermann to have to go to the hospital. He put a splint on the finger and bandaged it. They would decide in the morning.

When he was finished he got himself a beer as Niedermann rinsed his eyes over and over in the bathroom.

CHAPTER 32

Blomkvist arrived at Göteborg Central Station just after 9:00 p.m. The X2000 had made up some time, but it was still late. He had spent the last hour of the journey calling car rental companies. He’d first thought of finding a car in Alingsås and getting off there, but the office was closed already. Ultimately he managed to order a Volkswagen through a hotel booking agency in the city. He could pick up the car at Järntorget. He decided not to try to navigate Göteborg’s confusing local traffic and incomprehensible ticket system and took a cab to the lot.

When he got to the car there was no map in the glove compartment. He bought one in a gas station, along with a flashlight, a bottle of mineral water, and a cup of coffee, which he put in the holder on the dashboard. It was 10:30 before he drove out of the city on the road to Alingsås.

A fox stopped and looked about restlessly. He knew that something was buried there. But from somewhere nearby came the rustle of an unwary night animal and the fox was instantly on the alert for easier prey. He took a cautious step. But before he continued his hunt he lifted his hind leg and pissed on the spot to mark his territory.

Bublanski did not normally call his colleagues late in the evening, but this time he couldn’t resist. He picked up the phone and dialled Modig’s number.

“Pardon me for calling so late. Are you up?”

“No problem.”

“I’ve just finished going through Björck’s report.”

“I’m sure you had as much trouble putting it down as I did.”

“Sonja… how do you make sense of what’s going on?”

“It seems to me that Gunnar Björck, a prominent name on the list of johns, if you remember, had Lisbeth Salander put in an asylum after she tried to protect herself and her mother from a lunatic sadist who was working for Säpo. He was abetted in this by Dr. Teleborian, among others, on whose testimony we in part based our own evaluation of her mental state.”

“This changes the entire picture we have of her.”

“It explains a great deal.”

“Sonja, can you pick me up in the morning at 8:00?”

“Of course.”

“We’re going to go down to Smådalarö to have a talk with Gunnar Björck. I made some enquiries. He’s on sick leave.”

“I’m looking forward to it already.”

Beckman looked at his wife as she stood by the window in the living room, staring out at the water. She had her mobile in her hand, and he knew that she was waiting for a call from Blomkvist. She looked so unhappy that he went over and put his arm around her.

“Blomkvist is a grown man,” he said. “But if you’re really so worried you should call that policeman.”

Berger sighed. “I should have done that hours ago. But that’s not why I’m unhappy.”

“Is it something I should know about?”

“I’ve been hiding something from you. And from Mikael. And from everyone else at the magazine.”

“Hiding? Hiding what?”

She turned to her husband and told him that she had been offered the job of editor in chief at Svenska Morgon-Posten. Beckman raised his eyebrows.

“But I don’t understand why you didn’t tell me,” he said. “That’s a huge coup. Congratulations.”

“It’s just that I feel like a traitor.”

“Mikael will understand. Everyone has to move on when it’s time. And right now it’s time for you.”

“I know.”

“Have you already made up your mind?”

“Yes. I’ve made up my mind. But I haven’t had the guts to tell anybody. And it feels as if I’m leaving in the midst of a huge disaster.” Beckman took his wife in his arms.

Armansky rubbed his eyes and looked out into the darkness.

“We ought to call Bublanski,” he said.

“No,” Palmgren said. “Neither Bublanski nor any other authority figure has ever lifted a finger to help her. Let her take care of her own affairs.”

Armansky looked at Salander’s former guardian. He was still amazed by the improvement in Palmgren’s condition compared with when he last saw him over Christmas. He still slurred his words, but he had a new vitality in his eyes. There was also a fury about the man that Armansky had never seen before. Palmgren told him the whole story that Blomkvist had pieced together. Armansky was shocked.

“She’s going to try to kill her father.”

“That’s possible,” Palmgren said calmly.

“Or else Zalachenko might try to kill her.”

“That’s also possible.”

“So we’re just supposed to wait?”

“Dragan… you’re a good person. But what Lisbeth Salander does or doesn’t do, whether she survives or whether she dies, is not your responsibility.”

Palmgren threw out his arms. All of a sudden he had rediscovered a coordination that he hadn’t had in a long time. It was as though the drama of the past few weeks had revived his dulled senses.

“I’ve never been sympathetic towards people who take the law into their own hands. But I’ve never heard of anyone who had such a good reason to do so. At the risk of sounding like a cynic, what happens tonight will happen, no matter what you or I think. It’s been written in the stars since she was born. And all that remains is for us to decide how we’re going to behave towards Lisbeth if she makes it back.”

Armansky sighed and looked grimly at the old lawyer.

“And if she spends the next ten years in prison, at least she was the one who chose that path. I’ll still be her friend,” Palmgren said.

“I had no idea you had such a libertarian view of humanity.”

“Neither did I,” he said.

Miriam Wu stared at the ceiling. She had the nightlight on and the radio was playing “On a Slow Boat to China ” at a low volume.

The day before she had woken to find herself in the hospital where Paolo Roberto had brought her. She slept and woke restlessly and went to sleep again with no real grasp of passing time. The doctors told her that she had a concussion. In any case she needed to rest. She had a broken nose, three broken ribs, and bruises all over her body. Her left eyebrow was so swollen that her eye was merely a slit. It hurt whenever she tried to change position. It hurt when she breathed in. Her neck was painful and she was wearing a brace, just to be on the safe side. But the doctors had assured her that she would make a complete recovery.

When she awoke towards evening, Paolo Roberto was sitting next to her bed. He grinned and asked how she felt. She wondered if she looked as awful as he did.

She asked questions and he answered them. For some reason it didn’t seem at all odd that he was a good friend of Salander’s. He was a cocky devil. Lisbeth liked cocky devils, just as she detested pompous jerks. There was only a subtle difference, but Paolo Roberto belonged to the former category.

She now had an explanation for why he had suddenly sprung out of nowhere into the warehouse, but she was surprised that he’d decided so stubbornly to pursue the van. And she was frightened by the news that the police were digging up bodies in the woods around the warehouse.

“Thank you,” she said. “You saved my life.”

He shook his head and sat quietly for a while.

“I tried to explain it to Blomkvist. He didn’t really get it. But I think you might understand since you box yourself.”

She knew what he meant. No-one who hadn’t been there would ever know what it was to fight a monster who couldn’t feel pain. She thought about how helpless she’d been.

After that she had just held his bandaged hand. They didn’t speak for a long time. There was nothing more to say. When she woke up, he was gone. She wished that Lisbeth would get in touch. She was the one Niedermann had been after.

Miriam was afraid that he would catch her.

Salander couldn’t breathe. She had no sense of time, but she knew that she had been shot, and she realized – more by instinct than by rational thought – that she was buried underground. Her left arm was unusable, she couldn’t move a muscle without waves of pain shooting through her shoulder, and she was floating in and out of a foggy consciousness. I have to get air. Her head was bursting with a throbbing pain the likes of which she had never felt before.

Her right hand had ended up underneath her face, and she began instinctively to nudge the earth away from her nose and mouth. It was sandy and relatively dry. She managed to create a space the size of her fist in front of her face.

How long she had been lying there buried she had no idea. But finally she formulated a lucid thought and it gripped her with panic. He buried me alive. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. A vast weight of soil held her bound to the primal rock.

She tried to move a leg, but she could scarcely tense her muscles. Then she made the mistake of trying to get up. She pressed down with her head to try to raise herself and the pain flew like an electric charge through her temples. I can’t throw up. She sank back into muddled consciousness.

When she could think again, she felt carefully to determine which parts of her body were functional. The only limb she could move an inch or two was her right hand, the one in front of her face. I have to get air. The air was above her, above the grave.

Salander began to scratch. She pressed down on her elbow and managed to make a little room to manoeuvre. With the back of her hand she enlarged the area in front of her face by pressing the dirt away from her. I need to dig.

She discovered that she had a cavity within her fetal position, between her elbows and her knees. That was where most of the air that was keeping her alive had been trapped. She began desperately twisting her upper body back and forth and felt how the soil ran into the space beneath her. The pressure on her chest lifted a little. She could move her arm.

Minute by minute she worked in a semiconscious state. She scratched sandy earth from her face and pressed handful after handful into the cavity beneath her. Gradually she managed to free her arm so that she could shift the soil away from the top of her head. Inch by inch she enlarged the space around her head. She felt something hard and was suddenly holding a small root or stick in her hand. She scratched upwards. The soil was still full of air and not very compact.

The fox paused by Salander’s grave on the way back to his den. He had found two field mice and was feeling satisfied when suddenly he sensed another presence. He froze and pricked up his ears. His whiskers and nose were quivering.

Salander’s fingers emerged like something dead from beneath the earth. Had there been any human watching, he would probably have reacted like the fox. He was gone like a shot.

Salander felt cool air stream down her arm. She could breathe again.

It took her half an hour more to free herself from the grave. She found it odd that she couldn’t use her left hand, but mechanically went on scratching at the dirt and sand with her right.

She needed something else to dig with. She pulled her arm down into the hole, got to her breast pocket and worked the cigarette case free. She opened it and used it as a scoop. She scraped soil loose and flicked it away. And then at last she could move her right shoulder and managed to press it upwards through the earth above her. Then she scraped more sand and dirt and eventually was able to straighten her head. She now had her right arm and head above the ground. When she had released part of her upper body she could start squirming upwards an inch at a time until the ground suddenly released its grip on her legs.

She crawled from the grave with her eyes closed and didn’t stop until her shoulder hit a tree trunk. Slowly she turned her body so that she had the tree to lean on and wiped the dirt from her eyes with the back of her hand before she opened them. It was pitch-black around her and the air was icy cold. She was sweating. She felt a dull pain in her head, in her left shoulder, and in her hip, but didn’t spend any energy wondering why. She sat still for ten minutes, breathing. Then it came to her that she couldn’t stay there.

She struggled to her feet as the world swirled around her.

She felt instantly sick and bent over to vomit.

Then she started to walk. She had no idea which direction she was going. The pain in her left hip was excruciating and she kept stumbling to her knees. Each time an even greater pain shot through her head.

She didn’t know how long she’d been walking when she saw a light out of the corner of her eye. She changed direction. It was only when she was standing by the woodshed in the yard that she realized she had walked straight back to Zalachenko’s farmhouse. She swayed like a drunk.

Photo cells on the driveway and in the clearing. She had come from the other direction. They would not have noticed her.

She was confused. She knew that she was in no condition to take on Niedermann and Zalachenko. She looked at the white farmhouse.

Click. Wood. Click. Fire.

She fantasized about a gasoline can and a match.

With enormous effort she turned towards the shed and staggered over to a door that was secured with a crossbar. She managed to lift it by putting her right shoulder under it. She heard the noise when the crossbar fell to the ground and hit the side of the door with a bang. She took a step into the darkness and looked around.

It was a woodshed. There was no gasoline.

At the kitchen table Zalachenko looked up when he heard the sound of the falling crossbar. He pulled the curtain aside and peered out into the darkness. It was a few seconds before his eyes adjusted. The wind was blowing harder now. The weather forecast had predicted a stormy weekend. Then he saw that the door to the woodshed was ajar.

He and Niedermann had brought in wood earlier that afternoon. It had been unnecessary, but its purpose was to provide Salander with confirmation that she had come to the right place and to draw her out.

Niedermann had obviously not set the crossbar in place properly. He could be so phenomenally clumsy. Zalachenko glanced towards the door of the living room, where Niedermann had dozed off on the sofa. He thought of waking him, but decided not to.

To find gasoline Salander would have to go to the barn, where the cars were parked. She leaned against a chopping block, breathing hard. She had to rest. She sat there for about a minute before she heard the halting steps of Zalachenko’s prosthesis.

In the dark Blomkvist took a wrong turn at Mellby, north of Sollebrunn. Instead of getting off at Nossebro he had continued north. He realized his mistake just before he got to Trökörna. He stopped and looked at the map.

He cursed and turned back towards Nossebro.

With her right hand Salander grabbed the axe from the chopping block a second before Zalachenko came into the woodshed. She didn’t have the strength to lift it over her shoulder, but she swung it with one hand in an upward arc, putting her weight on her uninjured hip and turning her body in a semicircle.

At the same moment that Zalachenko turned on the light switch, the blade of the axe struck him across the right side of his face, smashing his cheekbone and penetrating into his forehead. He didn’t know what had happened, but in the next second his brain registered the pain and he howled as if possessed.

Niedermann woke with a start and sat up, bewildered. He heard a screaming that at first he couldn’t believe was human. It was coming from outside. Then he realized it was Zalachenko. He got swiftly to his feet.

Salander planted her feet and swung the axe again, but her body was not obeying orders. Her aim was to bury the axe in her father’s head, but she had exhausted all her strength and struck him far from the intended target, just below his kneecap. But the weight of the axe head buried it so deep that it stuck and was pulled out of her hands when Zalachenko pitched forward into the shed. He was screaming incessantly.

She bent again to grasp the axe. The earth shook as lightning flashed inside her head. She had to sit down. She reached out her hand and felt his jacket pockets. He still had the gun, and she focused her gaze as the ground swayed.

A Browning .22 calibre.

A fucking Boy Scout pistol.

That was why she was still alive. If she’d been hit with a bullet from Niedermann’s Sig Sauer or from a revolver with heavier ammo, she would have a gigantic hole through her skull.

At that moment she heard the stumbling approach of Niedermann, who then filled the doorway of the shed. He stopped short and registered the scene before him with uncomprehending and staring eyes. Zalachenko was wailing like a man possessed. His face was a bloody mask. He had an axe wedged in his knee. A bloody and filthy Salander was sitting on the floor next to him. She looked like something from a horror movie, and far too many of those had already played out in Niedermann’s mind.

He, who could feel no pain and was built like a tank, had never liked the dark.

With his own eyes he had seen creatures in the dark, and an indeterminate terror was always lurking, waiting for him. And now the terror had materialized.

The girl on the floor was dead. There was no doubt about that.

He had buried her himself.

Consequently, the creature on the floor was no girl, but a being from the other side of the grave who couldn’t be conquered with human strength or weapons known to man.

The transformation from human being to corpse had already begun. Her skin had changed into a lizardlike armour. Her bared teeth were piercing spikes for ripping chunks of meat from her prey. Her reptilian tongue shot out and licked around her mouth. Her bloody hands had razor-sharp claws four inches long. He could see her eyes glowing. He could hear her growling low and saw her tense her muscles to pounce at his throat.

He saw clearly that she had a tail that curled and ominously began to whip the floor.

Then she raised the pistol and fired. The bullet passed so close to Niedermann’s ear that he could feel the lash of the wind. He saw her mouth spout flames at him.

That was too much.

He stopped thinking.

He spun around and ran for his life. She fired another shot that missed him but that seemed to give him wings. He hopped over a fence and was swallowed up by the darkness of the field as he sprinted towards the main road.

Salander watched in astonishment as he disappeared from view.

She shuffled to the doorway and gazed into the darkness, but she couldn’t see him. After a while Zalachenko stopped screaming, but he lay moaning in shock. She opened the pistol, checked that she had one round left, and considered shooting him in the head. Then she remembered that Niedermann was still there, out in the dark, and she had better save it. She would need more than one .22 bullet for him. But it was better than nothing.

It took her five minutes to put the crossbar in place. She staggered across the yard and into the house and found the telephone on a sideboard in the kitchen. She dialled a number she hadn’t used in two years. The answering machine clicked in.

Hi. This is Mikael Blomkvist. I can’t answer right now, but please leave your name and number and I’ll call you as soon as I can.

Beep.

“Mir-g-kral,” she said, and heard that her voice sounded like mush. She swallowed. “Mikael. It’s Salander.”

Then she did not know what to say.

She hung up the receiver.

Niedermann’s Sig Sauer lay disassembled for cleaning on the kitchen table in front of her, and next to it Sonny Nieminen’s P-83 Wanad. She dropped Zalachenko’s Browning on the floor and lurched over to pick up the Wanad and check the magazine. She also found her Palm PDA and dropped it in her pocket. Then she hobbled to the sink and filled an unwashed cup with cold water. She drank four cups. When she looked up she saw her face in an old shaving mirror on the wall. She almost fired a shot out of sheer fright. What she saw reminded her more of an animal than a human being. She was a madwoman with a distorted face and a gaping mouth. She was plastered with dirt. Her face and neck were a coagulated gruel of blood and soil. Now she had an idea what Niedermann had encountered in the woodshed.

She went closer to the mirror and was suddenly aware that her left leg was dragging behind her. She had a sharp pain in her hip where Zalachenko’s first bullet had hit her. His second bullet had struck her shoulder and paralyzed her left arm. It hurt.

But the pain in her head was so sharp it made her stagger. Slowly she raised her right hand and fumbled across the back of her head. With her fingers she could feel the crater of the entry wound.

As she fingered the hole in her skull she realized with sudden horror that she was touching her own brain, that she was so seriously wounded she was dying or maybe should already be dead. She couldn’t comprehend how she could still be on her feet.

She was suddenly overcome by a numbing weariness. She wasn’t sure if she was about to faint or fall asleep, but she made her way to the kitchen bench, where she stretched out and laid the unwounded right side of her head on a cushion.

She had to regain her strength, but she knew that she couldn’t risk sleeping while Niedermann was still at large. Sooner or later he would come back. Sooner or later Zalachenko would manage to get out of the woodshed and drag himself to the house. But she no longer had the energy to stay upright. She was freezing. She clicked off the safety on the pistol.

Niedermann stood, undecided, on the road from Sollebrunn to Nossebro. He was alone. It was dark. He had begun to think rationally again and was ashamed that he had run away. He didn’t understand how it could have happened, but he came to the logical conclusion that she must have survived. Somehow she must have managed to dig herself out.

Zalachenko needed him. He ought to go back to the house and wring her neck.

At the same time he had a powerful feeling that everything was over. He had had that feeling for a long time. Things had started to go wrong and kept going wrong from the moment Bjurman had contacted them. Zalachenko had changed beyond recognition when he heard the name Lisbeth Salander. All the rules about caution and moderation he had preached for so many years had been blown away.

Niedermann hesitated.

Zalachenko needed to be looked after.

If she hadn’t already killed him.

That meant there would be questions.

He bit his lower lip.

He had been his father’s partner for many years. They had been good years. He had money put away and he also knew where Zalachenko had hidden his own fortune. He had the resources and the skill required to drive the business forward. The sensible thing would be to walk away from all this and not look back. If there was one thing that Zalachenko had drummed into him, it was always to retain the ability to walk away, without sentimentality, from a situation that felt unmanageable. That was a basic rule for survival. Don’t lift a finger for a lost cause.

She wasn’t supernatural. But she was bad news. She was his half sister.

He had underestimated her.

Niedermann was torn. Part of him wanted to go back and wring her neck. Part of him wanted to keep running through the night.

He had his passport and wallet in his pocket. He didn’t want to go back. There was nothing at the farm he needed.

Except perhaps a car.

He was still hesitating when he saw the gleam of headlights approaching from the other side of the hill. He turned his head. All he needed was a car to get him to Göteborg.

For the first time in her life – at least since she had been a little girl – Salander was unable to take command of her situation. Over the years she had been mixed up in fights, subjected to abuse, been the object of both official and private injustices. She had taken many more punches to both body and soul than anyone should ever have to endure.

But she had been able to rebel every time. She had refused to answer Teleborian’s questions, and when she was subjected to any kind of physical violence, she had been able to slink away and retreat.

A broken nose she could live with.

But she couldn’t live with a hole in her skull.

This time she couldn’t drag herself home to bed, pull the covers over her head, sleep for two days and then get up and go back to her daily routine as if nothing had happened.

She was so seriously injured that she couldn’t cope with the situation by herself. She was so exhausted that her body refused to listen to her commands.

I have to sleep for a while, she thought. And suddenly she realized that if she closed her eyes and let go there was a good chance she would never wake up again. She analyzed this conclusion and gradually came to understand that she didn’t care. On the contrary. She felt almost attracted by the thought. To rest. To not wake up.

Her last thoughts were of Miriam Wu.

Forgive me, Mimmi.

She was still holding Nieminen’s pistol, with the safety off, when she closed her eyes.

Blomkvist saw Niedermann in the beam of his headlights from a long way off and recognized him at once. It was hard to mistake a blond behemoth built like an armor-piercing robot. Niedermann was running in his direction, waving his arms. Blomkvist slowed down. He slipped his hand into the outer pocket of his laptop case and took out the Colt 1911 Government he had found on Salander’s desk. He stopped about five yards away from Niedermann and turned off the engine before opening the car door and stepping out.

“Thanks for stopping,” Niedermann said, out of breath. “I had a… car accident. Can you give me a lift to town?”

He had a surprisingly high-pitched voice.

“Of course. I can see that you get to town,” Blomkvist said. He pointed the gun at Niedermann. “Lie down on the ground.”

There was no end to the tribulations Niedermann was having to suffer that night. He stared in puzzlement at Blomkvist.

Niedermann was not the least bit afraid of either the pistol or the man holding it. On the other hand, he had respect for weapons. He had lived with violence all his life. He assumed that if somebody pointed a gun at him, that person was prepared to use it. He squinted and tried to take stock of the man behind the pistol, but the headlights turned him into a shadowy figure. Police? He didn’t sound like a cop. Cops usually identified themselves. At least that’s what they did in the movies.

He weighed his chances. He knew that if he charged the man he could take away the gun. But the man sounded cold and was standing behind the car door. He would be hit by at least one, maybe two bullets. If he moved fast the man might miss, or at least not hit a vital organ, but even if he survived, the bullets would make it difficult and perhaps impossible for him to escape. It would be better to wait for a more suitable opportunity.

“LIE DOWN NOW!” Blomkvist yelled.

He moved the muzzle an inch and fired a round into the ditch.

“The next one hits your kneecap,” Blomkvist said in a loud, clear voice of command.

Niedermann got down on his knees, blinded by the headlights.

“Who are you?” he said.

Blomkvist reached his other hand into the pocket in the car door and took out the flashlight he had bought at the gas station. He shone the beam into Niedermann’s face.

“Hands behind your back,” Blomkvist commanded. “And spread your legs.”

He waited until Niedermann reluctantly obeyed the orders.

“I know who you are. If you even begin to do anything stupid I’ll shoot you without warning. I’m aiming at your lung below your shoulder blade. You might be able to take me… but it’ll cost you.”

He put the flashlight on the ground and took off his belt and made a noose with it, exactly as he’d learned two decades earlier as a rifleman in Kiruna when he did his military service. He stood between the giant’s legs, looped the noose around his arms and pulled it tight above the elbows. The mighty Niedermann was for all practical purposes helpless.

And then what? Blomkvist looked around. They were completely alone on a road in the dark. Paolo Roberto hadn’t been exaggerating when he described Niedermann. The man was huge. The question was only why such a massive guy had come running in the middle of the night as if he were being chased by the Devil himself.

“I’m looking for Lisbeth Salander. I assume you met her.”

Niedermann did not answer.

“Where is Lisbeth Salander?”

Niedermann gave him a peculiar look. He didn’t understand what was happening to him on this strange night when everything seemed to be going wrong.

Blomkvist shrugged. He went back to the car, opened the trunk, and found a neatly coiled rope. He couldn’t leave Niedermann tied up in the middle of the road, so he looked around. Thirty yards further along the road he saw a traffic sign in the headlights. CAUTION: MOOSE CROSSING.

“Get up.”

He put the muzzle of the gun against Niedermann’s neck, led him to the sign, and forced him into the ditch. He told Niedermann to sit with his back against the pole. Niedermann hesitated.

“This is all quite simple,” Blomkvist said. “You killed Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson. They were my friends. I’m not going to let you loose on the road, so either you sit here while I tie you or I’ll shoot you in the kneecap. Your choice.”

Niedermann sat. Blomkvist ran the tow rope around his neck and tied his head securely to the pole. Then he used fifty feet of rope to bind the giant fast around the torso and waist. He saved a length to tie his forearms to the pole, and finished off his handiwork with some real sailor’s knots.

When he was finished, he asked again where Salander was. He got no reply, so he shrugged and left Niedermann there. It wasn’t until he was back in the car that he felt the adrenaline flowing and realized what he had just done. The image of Johansson’s face flickered before his eyes.

Blomkvist lit a cigarette and drank some water out of the bottle. He looked at the figure in the dark beneath the moose sign. Then he looked at the map and saw that he had about half a mile before the turnoff to Karl Axel Bodin’s farm. He started the engine and drove past Niedermann.

He drove slowly past the turnoff with the sign to Gosseberga and parked next to a barn on a forest road a hundred yards further north. He took his pistol and turned his flashlight on. He found fresh tire tracks in the mud and decided that another car had been parked in that same place earlier, but he didn’t stop to consider what that might mean. He walked back to the turnoff and shone light on the mailbox. P.O. BOX 192 – K.A.BODIN. He continued along the road.

It was almost midnight when he saw the lights from Bodin’s farmhouse. He stood still for several minutes but heard nothing other than the usual nighttime sounds. Instead of taking the road straight to the farm, he walked along the edge of the field and approached the building from the barn, stopping in the yard about a hundred feet from the house. His every nerve was on edge. The fact that Niedermann had been running away was reason enough to believe that some catastrophe had occurred here.

Suddenly he heard a sound. He spun around and dropped to one knee with his gun raised. It took him a few seconds to identify the source: one of the outbuildings. Somebody moaning. He moved quickly across the grass and stopped by the shed. Peering round the corner he could see a light inside.

He listened. Someone was moving around. Holding the pistol in front of him, he lifted the crossbar with his left hand, pulled open the door, and was confronted by a pair of terrified eyes in a blood-streaked face. He saw the axe on the floor.

“Holy shit,” he said.

Then he saw the prosthesis.

Zalachenko.

Salander had definitely paid him a visit, but Blomkvist couldn’t imagine what must have happened. He closed the door and replaced the crossbar.

With Zalachenko in the woodshed and Niedermann bound hand and foot beside the road to Sollebrunn, Blomkvist hurried across the courtyard to the farmhouse. It was possible that there was a third person who might yet be a danger, but the house seemed unoccupied, almost abandoned. Pointing his gun at the ground, he eased open the front door. He came into a dark hall and saw a rectangle of light from the kitchen. The only sound was the ticking of a wall clock. When he reached the door he saw Salander lying on the kitchen bench.

For a moment he stood as if petrified, staring at her mangled body. He noticed that she was holding a pistol in her hand, which hung loosely off the edge of the bench. He went to her side and sank to his knees. He thought about how he had found Svensson and Johansson and thought that she was dead too. Then he saw a slight movement in her chest and heard a feeble, wheezing breath.

He reached out his hand and carefully loosened the gun from her grip. Suddenly her fist tightened around its butt. She opened her eyes to two narrow slits and stared at him for many long seconds. Her eyes were unfocused. Then he heard her mutter in such a low voice that he could only with difficulty catch the words.

Kalle Fucking Blomkvist.

She closed her eyes and let go of the gun. He put it on the floor, took out his mobile, and dialled the number for emergency services.