The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) (23 page)

But however hard she tried, she could not manage it. She had not really been expecting to do so. It was a sophisticated encryption, named after the originators Rivest, Shamir and Adleman. R.S.A. has two keys – one public, one secret – and is based on Euler’s
phi
function and Fermat’s little theorem, but above all on the simple fact that it is easy to multiply two large prime numbers. A calculator will give you the answer in the blink of an eye. Yet it is all but impossible to work backwards and, on the basis of the answer, calculate the prime numbers you started out with. Computers are not yet efficient at prime-number factorization, something which had exasperated Lisbeth Salander and the world’s intelligence organizations many times in the past.

For about a year now Salander had been thinking that E.C.M., the Elliptic Curve Method, would be more promising than previous algorithms, and she had spent long nights writing her own factorization program. But now, in the early hours of the morning, she realized it would need more refinement to have even the slightest chance of success. After three hours of work, she took a break and went to the kitchen, drank some orange juice straight from the carton and ate two microwaved piroshki.

Back at her desk she hacked into Blomkvist’s computer to see if he had come up with anything new. He had posted two more questions for her and she realized at once: he wasn’t so hopeless after all.

he wrote. And that was a reasonable question.

But she did not answer. She could not care less about Arvid Wrange. And she had made progress and worked out who the hollow-eyed junkie was, the man Wrange had been in touch with, who had called himself Bogey. Trinity in Hacker Republic remembered somebody with that same handle from a number of sites some years previously. That did not necessarily mean anything – Bogey was not the most original alias. But Salander had traced the posts and thought she could be onto something – especially when he carelessly dropped that he was a computer engineer from Moscow University.

Salander was unable to find out when he graduated, or any other dates for that matter, but she got hold of a couple of nerdy details about how Bogey was hooked on fine watches and crazy for the Arsène Lupin films from the ’70s, about the gentleman thief of that name.

Then Salander posted questions on every conceivable website for former and current students at Moscow University, asking if anybody knew a scrawny, hollow-eyed ex-junkie who had been a street urchin and master thief and loved Arsène Lupin films. It was not long before she got a reply.

“That sounds like Jurij Bogdanov,” wrote someone who introduced herself as Galina.

According to this Galina, Bogdanov was a legend at the university. Not just because he had hacked into all the lecturers’ computers and had dirt on every one of them. He was always asking people: will you bet me one hundred roubles I can’t break into that house over there?

Many who did not know him thought this was easy money. But Jurij could pick any door lock, and if for some reason he failed he would shin up the facade or the walls instead. He was known for his daring, and for his evil. He was said once to have kicked a dog to death when it disturbed him in his work and he was always stealing things, just for the hell of it. Galina thought he might have been a kleptomaniac. But he was also a genius hacker and a talented analyst, and after he graduated the world was his oyster. He did not want a job, he wanted to go his own way, he said, and it did not take Salander long to work out what he got up to after university – at least according to the official version.

Jurij Bogdanov was now thirty-four years old. He had left Russia and lived in Berlin on Budapester Strasse, not far from the Michelin-starred restaurant Hugo’s. He ran a white-hat computer security business – Outcast Security – with seven employees and a turnover in the last financial year of twenty-two million euros. It was ironic – yet somehow entirely logical – that his front was a company which protected industrial groups from people like himself. He had not had any criminal convictions since he took his exams in 2009 and managed a wide network of contacts – one of the members of his board of directors was Ivan Gribanov, member of the Russian Duma and a major shareholder in the oil company Gazprom – but she could find nothing to get her further.

Blomkvist’s second question was:

He did not explain why he was interested in the place. But she knew that Blomkvist was not someone who threw questions out at random. Nor did he make a habit of being unclear.

If he was being cryptic, then he had a reason to be: the information must be sensitive. There was evidently something significant about this medical centre. Salander soon discovered that it had attracted a number of complaints – children had been forgotten or ignored and had been able to self-harm. Oden’s was managed privately by its director, Torkel Lindén, and his company Care Me and, if one was to believe past employees, Lindén’s word was law. The profit margin was always high because nothing was bought unless absolutely necessary.

Lindén himself was a former star gymnast, among other things a one-time Swedish high-bar champion. Nowadays he was a passionate hunter and member of a Christian congregation that took an uncompromising line on homosexuality. Salander went onto the websites of the Swedish Association for Hunting and Wildlife Management and the Friends of Christ to see what kinds of activities were going on there. Then she sent Lindén two fake but enticing emails which looked as if they had come from the organizations, attaching PDF files with sophisticated malware which would open automatically if Lindén clicked on the messages.

By 8.23 she had got onto the server and immediately confirmed her suspicions. August Balder had been admitted to the clinic the previous afternoon. In the medical file, underneath a description of the circumstances which had resulted in his admittance, it said:

Infantile autism, severe mental impairment. Restless. Severely traumatized by death of father. Constant observation required. Difficult to handle. Brought jigsaw puzzles. Not allowed to draw! Observed to be compulsive and destructive. Diagnosis by psychologist Forsberg, confirmed by T.L.

And the following had been added underneath, clearly somewhat later:

Professor Charles Edelman, Chief Inspector Bublanski and Detective Sergeant Modig will visit A. Balder at 10.00 on Wednesday, November 22. T.L. will be present. Drawing under supervision.

Further down still it said:

Change of venue. A. Balder to be taken by T.L. and Professor Edelman to his mother Hanna Balder on Torsgatan, Bublanski and Modig will join. A.B. is thought likely to draw better in his home environment.

Salander quickly checked who Edelman was, and when she saw that his specialism was savant skills she understood straight away what was going on. They seemed to be working towards some sort of witness statement in the form of a sketch. Why else would Bublanski and Sonja Modig be interested in the boy’s drawing, and why else would Blomkvist have been so cautious in framing his question?

None of this must be allowed to get out. No killer must be able to find out that the boy might be able to draw a picture of him. Salander decided to see for herself how careful Lindén had been in his correspondence. Luckily he had not written anything more about the boy’s drawing ability. He had on the other hand received an email from Edelman at 23.10 last night, copied to Modig and Bublanski. That email was clearly the reason why the meeting place had been changed. Edelman wrote:

The hell you have, Salander thought, and read on:

Best regards

Charles Edelman>

Bublanski and Modig had replied at 7.01 and 7.14 respectively. There was good reason, they wrote, to rely on Edelman’s expertise and follow his advice. Lindén had just now, at 7.57, confirmed that he and the boy would wait for Charles Edelman outside the entrance on Sveavägen. Salander sat for a while, lost in thought. Then she went to the kitchen and picked up a few old biscuits from the larder, and looked out towards Slussen and Riddarfjärden.
So
, she thought,
the venue for the meeting has been changed
.

Instead of doing his drawing at the medical centre, the boy would be driven home to his mother. The presence of the mother has a positive effect, Edelman wrote. There was something about that phrase Salander did not like. It felt old-fashioned, didn’t it? And the introduction itself was not much better: “The reason being that it is recognized in literature on the subject …”

It was stilted. Although it was true that many academics could not write to save their lives, and she knew nothing about the way in which this professor normally expressed himself, would one of the world’s leading neurologists really feel the need to lean on what is recognized in the literature? Wouldn’t he be more self-assured?

Salander went to her computer and skimmed through some of Edelman’s papers on the net; she may have found the odd little touch of vanity, even in the most factual passages, but there was nothing clumsy or psychologically naive in what he had written. On the contrary, the man was sharp. So she went back to the emails and checked to find out which SMTP server it had been transmitted through, and that made her jump right away. The server, Birdino, was not familiar, which it should have been, so she sent it a series of commands to see exactly what it was. In a matter of seconds she had the evidence in black and white: the server supported open mail relay, and the sender could therefore transmit messages from any address he or she wanted.

In other words, the email from Edelman was a fake, and the copies to Bublanski and Modig were no more than a smokescreen. She hardly even needed to check; she already knew what had happened: the police’s replies and the approval of the altered arrangements were also a bluff. It didn’t just mean that someone was pretending to be Edelman. There also had to be a leak, and above all, somebody wanted the boy outside on the street on Sveavägen.

Somebody wanted him defenceless in the street so that … what? They could kidnap or get rid of him? Salander looked at her watch; it was already 8.55. In just twenty minutes Torkel Lindén and August Balder would be outside waiting for someone who was not Professor Edelman, and who had anything but good intentions towards them.

What should she do? Call the police? That was never her first choice. She was especially reluctant when there was a risk of leaks. Instead, she went onto Oden’s website and got hold of Lindén’s office number. But she only made it as far as the switchboard. Lindén was in a meeting. So she found his mobile. After ending up in his voicemail, she swore out loud, and sent him both a text and an email telling him not to go out into the street with the boy, not under any circumstances. She signed herself “Wasp” for lack of any better idea.

Then she threw on her leather jacket and rushed out. But she turned, ran back into the apartment and packed her laptop with the encrypted file and her pistol, a Beretta 92, into a black sports bag before hurrying out again. She wondered if she should take her car, the B.M.W. M6 Convertible gathering dust in the garage. But she decided a taxi would be quicker. She soon regretted it. When a taxi finally appeared, it was clear that rush-hour had not subsided.

Traffic inched forward and Centralbron was almost at a standstill. Had there been an accident? Everything went slowly, everything but the time, which flew. Soon it was 9.05, then 9.10. She was in a tearing hurry and in the worst case it was already too late. Most likely Lindén and the boy went out onto the street ahead of time and the killer, or whoever it was, had already struck.

She dialled Lindén’s number again. This time the call went through, but there was no answer, so she swore again and thought of Mikael Blomkvist. She had not actually spoken to him in ages. But now she called him and he answered, sounding irritated. Only when he realized who it was did he brighten up:

“Lisbeth, is that you?”

“Shut up and listen,” she said.

Blomkvist was in the
Millennium
offices on Götgatan, in a foul mood. It was not just because he had had another bad night. It was T.T. Usually a serious and decent news agency, T.T. had put out a bulletin claiming that Mikael Blomkvist was sabotaging the murder enquiry by withholding crucial information, which he intended to publish first in
Millennium
.

Allegedly his aim was to save the magazine from financial disaster and rebuild his own “ruined reputation”. Blomkvist had known that the story was in the offing. He had had a long conversation with its author, Harald Wallin, the evening before. But he could not have imagined such a devastating result.

It was made up of idiotic insinuations and unsubstantiated accusations, but Wallin had nonetheless managed to produce something which sounded almost objective, almost credible. The man obviously had good sources both within the Serner Group and the police. Admittedly the headline was innocuous –
PROSECUTOR CRITICAL OF MIKAEL BLOMKVIST
– and there was plenty of room in the story for Blomkvist to defend himself. But whichever of his enemies was responsible he understood media logic: if a news bureau as serious as T.T. publishes a story like this one, not only does that make it legitimate for everybody else to jump on the bandwagon, it just about requires them to take a tougher line. It explained why Blomkvist woke up to the online papers saying