The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) (29 page)

“Oh my God,” she muttered.

They were staggeringly large numbers which formed a familiar pattern alongside the numbers next to them. As she looked through the papers and came across the simple sequence 641, 647, 653 and 659, there was no longer any doubt: they were sexy prime quadruplets, sexy in the sense that they differed from each other by six.

There were also twin primes, and every other imaginable combination of prime numbers. She could not help but smile. “Awesome.”

But August neither responded nor looked up at her. He just kept kneeling by the coffee table, as if he wanted nothing more than to go on writing his numbers. It occurred to her that she had read something about savants and prime numbers, but she put it out of her mind. She was far too unwell for any kind of advanced thinking. Instead she went into the bathroom and took two more Vibramycin antibiotics which had been lying around in her apartment for years.

She packed her pistol and her computer, a few changes of clothes and to be on the safe side she put on a wig and a pair of dark glasses. When she was ready she asked the boy to get up. He did not respond, just held his pencil in a tight grip. For a moment she stood in front of him, stumped. Then she said sternly, “Get up!” and he did.

They put on their outer layers, took the lift down to the garage and set off for the safe house on Ingarö. Her left shoulder was tightly strapped and it ached, so she steered with her right hand. The top of her chest was hurting, she had a fever and had to stop a couple of times at the side of the road to rest. When finally they got to the beach and the jetty by Stora Barnvik on Ingarö, and followed the directions to climb the wooden steps up the slope to the house, she collapsed exhausted on the first bed she saw. She was shivering and freezing cold.

Soon after, breathing laboriously, she got up and sat at the kitchen table with her laptop, and tried once more to crack the file she had downloaded from the N.S.A. But she did not even come close. August sat next to her, looking stiffly at the pile of paper and crayons Berger had left for him, no longer interested in prime numbers, still less in drawing pictures. Perhaps he was in shock.

The man who called himself Jan Holtser was sitting in a room at the Clarion Hotel Arlanda, talking on the telephone with his daughter. As he had expected, she did not believe him.

“Are you scared of me?” she said. “Are you afraid I’m going to cross-examine you?”

“No, Olga, absolutely not,” he said. “It’s just that …”

He could not find the words. He knew Olga could tell he was hiding something, and ended the conversation sooner than he wanted to. Bogdanov was sitting next to him on the hotel bed, swearing. He had been through Balder’s computer at least a hundred times and found “fuck all”, as he put it. “Not a single fucking thing!”

“I stole a computer with nothing on it,” Holtser said.

“Right.”

“So what was the professor using it for?”

“For something very important, clearly. I can see that a large file, presumably connected to other computers, was deleted recently. But I can’t recover it. He knew his stuff, that guy.”

“Useless,” Holtser said.

“Completely fucking useless.”

“And the Blackphone?”

“There are a couple of calls I haven’t been able to trace, presumably from the Swedish security services or the N.D.R.E. But there’s something bothering me much more.”

“What’s that?”

“A long conversation the professor had just before you stormed in – he was talking to someone at the M.I.R.I., Machine Intelligence Research Institute.”

“What’s the problem with that?”

“The timing – I get the feeling he was having some sort of crisis. Also this institute works to ensure that intelligent computers don’t become a threat to mankind – it doesn’t look good. Balder could have given the M.I.R.I. his research or …”

“Or what?”

“Or he could have spilled the beans on us, at least what he knew.”

“That would be bad.”

Bogdanov nodded and Holtser swore quietly. Nothing had gone as planned and neither of them was used to failing. But here were two major mistakes in a row, and all because of a child, a retarded child.

That was bad enough. But the worst of it was that Kira was on her way, and it sounded like she had lost it. Neither of them was used to that either. On the contrary, they had grown accustomed to her cool elegance, the air of invincibility it gave their operations. Now she was furious, completely off the wall, screaming at them that they were useless, incompetent cretins. It was not so much that those shots might have missed Balder’s son. It was because of the woman who had appeared out of nowhere and rescued the boy. That woman sent Kira around the bend.

When Holtser had begun to describe her – the little he had seen – Kira bombarded him with questions. Whatever answer he gave seemed to be wrong, or at least sent her berserk, yelling that they should have killed her and that this was typical of them, brainless, useless. Neither of them could make sense of her violent reaction – they had never heard her yell like that before.

In fact there was a lot they did not know about her. Holtser would never forget his evening with her in a suite at Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen – they had had sex for the third or fourth time, and later they had been lying in bed drinking champagne and chatting about his wars and his murders, as they so often did. While stroking her arm he had discovered three scars side by side on her wrist.

“How did you get those, gorgeous?” he had said, and got a look of pure loathing in return.

He had never been allowed to sleep with her again. He took it to be a punishment for having asked. Kira looked after the group and gave them a lot of money. But neither he nor Bogdanov, nor anyone else in the group, was allowed to ask about her past. That was one of the unspoken rules and none of them would ever dream of trying. For better or for worse she was their benefactor, mostly for better, they thought, and they went along with her whims, living in constant uncertainty as to whether she would be affectionate or cold, or even give them a brutal, stinging slap.

Bogdanov closed the computer and took a swallow of his drink. They were trying to limit their drinking, so that Kira would not use that against them. But it was nearly impossible. The frustration and adrenalin drove them to it. Holtser fingered his mobile nervously.

“Didn’t Olga believe you?” Bogdanov said.

“Not a word. Soon she’ll see a child’s drawing of me on every billboard.”

“I don’t buy that drawing thing. Probably just wishful thinking on the part of the police.”

“So we’re supposed to kill a child for no reason?”

“It wouldn’t surprise me. Shouldn’t Kira be here by now?”

“Any time now.”

“Who do you think it was?”

“Who?”

“The girl who appeared from nowhere.”

“No idea,” Holtser said. “Not sure Kira knows either. But she’s worried about something.”

“We’ll probably end up having to kill them both.”

“That might be the least of it.”

August was not feeling well. That was obvious. Red patches flared on his throat and he was clenching his fists. Salander, sitting next to him at the round table, working on her R.S.A. encryption, was afraid he was on the verge of some sort of fit. But August only picked up a crayon, a black one.

At the same moment a gust of wind shook the large windowpanes in front of them. August hesitated and moved his hand back and forth across the table. But then he started to draw, a line here and a line there, followed by some small circles, buttons, Salander thought, then a hand, details of a chin, an unbuttoned shirt front. It began to go more quickly and the tension in the boy’s back and shoulders subsided – as if a wound had burst open and begun to heal.

There was a searing, tortured look in his eyes, and every now and then he shivered. But there was no doubt that something within him had eased. He picked up some new crayons and started to draw an oak-coloured floor, on which appeared pieces of a puzzle that seemed to represent a glittering town at night-time. It was clear even from the unfinished drawing that it would be anything but a pleasant one.

The hand and the unbuttoned shirt front became part of a large man with a protruding belly. He was standing, bent like a jackknife, beating a small person on the floor, a person who was not in the drawing for the simple reason that he was observing the scene, and on the receiving end of the blows.

It was an ugly scene, no doubt about that. But even though the picture revealed an assailant, it did not seem to have anything to do with the murder. Right in the middle, at the epicentre of the drawing, a furious, sweaty face appeared, every foul and bitter furrow captured with precision. Salander recognized it. She rarely watched T.V. or went to the cinema, but she knew it was the face of the actor Lasse Westman, the partner of August’s mother. She leaned forward to the boy and said, with a holy, quivering rage:

“We’ll never let him do that to you again. Never.”

23.xi

Alona Casales knew at once that something was wrong when she saw Commander Ingram’s lanky figure approach Needham’s desk. You could tell from his hesitant manner that the news was not good.

Ingram usually had a malicious grin on his face when he stuck a knife in someone’s back, but with Needham it was different. Even the most senior bosses were scared of Needham – he would raise all hell if anyone tried to mess with him. Ingram did not like scenes, still less humiliation, and that was what awaited him if he picked a fight with Needham.

While Needham was brash and explosive, Ingram was a refined upper-class boy with spindly legs and an affected manner. Ingram was a serious power player and had influence where it mattered, be it in Washington or in the world of business. As a member of the N.S.A. management, he ranked just below Admiral Charles O’Connor. He might be quick to smile and adept at handing out compliments, but his smile never reached his eyes.

He had leverage over people and was in charge, among other things, of “monitoring strategic technologies” – more cynically known as industrial espionage, that part of the N.S.A. which gives the American tech industry a helping hand in global competition. He was feared as few others were.

But now as he stood in front of Needham in his fancy suit, his body seemed to shrink. Even from thirty metres away, Casales knew exactly what was about to happen: Needham was on the brink of exploding. His pale, exhausted face was going red. Without waiting he got to his feet, his back crooked and bent, his belly sticking out, and he roared in a furious voice, “You sleazy bastard!”

No-one but Needham could call Jonny Ingram a “sleazy bastard”, and Casales loved him for it.

August started on a new drawing.

He sketched a few lines. He was pressing so hard on the paper that the black crayon broke and, just like the last time, he drew rapidly, one detail here and another one there, disparate bits which ultimately came together and formed a whole. It was the same room, but there was a different puzzle on the floor, easier to make out: it represented a red sports car racing by a sea of shouting spectators in a stand. Above the puzzle not one but two men could be seen standing.

One of them was Westman again. This time he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts and he had bloodshot, squinting eyes. He looked unsteady and drunk, but no less furious. He was drooling. Yet he was not the more frightening figure in the drawing. That was the other man, whose watery eyes shone with pure sadism. He too was unshaven and drunk, and he had thin, almost non-existent lips. He seemed to be kicking August, although again the boy could not be seen in the picture, his very absence making him extremely present.

“Who’s the other one?” Salander said.

August said nothing. But his shoulders shook, and his legs twisted into a knot under the table.

“Who’s the other one?” Salander said again, in a more forceful tone, and August wrote on the drawing in a shaky, childish hand:

Roger – the name meant nothing to Salander.

A couple of hours later in Fort Meade, once his hacker boys had cleaned up after themselves and shuffled off, Needham walked over to Casales. The odd thing was, he no longer looked at all angry or upset. He was radiant with defiance and carrying a notebook. One of his braces had slipped off his shoulder.

“Hey, bud,” she said. “Tell me, what’s going on?”

“I got some vacation time,” he said. “I’m off to Stockholm.”

“Of all places. Isn’t it cold this time of year?”

“Freezing, by all accounts.”

“So you’re not really going there on vacation.”

“Strictly between us?”

“Go on.”

“Ingram ordered us to halt our investigation. The hacker goes free, and we’re supposed to be satisfied with stopping up a few leaks. Then the whole thing gets swept under the carpet.”

“How the hell can he lay down something like that?”

“They don’t want to awaken any sleeping dogs, he says, and run the risk of anyone finding out about the attack. It would be devastating if it ever got out. Just think of all the malicious glee, and all the people whose heads would roll, starting with yours truly.”

“He threatened
you
?”

“Did he ever! Went on about how I would be humiliated publicly, even sued.”

“You don’t seem worried.”

“I’m going to break him.”

“How? Our glamour boy has powerful connections everywhere, you know that.”

“I have a few of my own. Besides, Ingram isn’t the only one with dirt on people. That damn hacker was gracious enough to link and match our computer files and show us some of our own dirty laundry.”

“That’s a bit ironic, isn’t it?”

“It takes a crook to know one. At first the data didn’t look all that spectacular, not compared to the other stuff we’re doing. But when we started to get into it …”

“Yes?”

“It turned out to be dynamite.”

“In what way?”

“Ingram’s closest colleagues not only
collect
trade secrets to help our own major companies. Sometimes they also
sell
the information for a lot of money. And that money, Alona, doesn’t always find its way into the coffers of the organization …”

“But into their own pockets.”

“Exactly. I already have enough evidence on that to put two of our top industrial-espionage executives behind bars.”

“Jesus.”

“Unfortunately it’s less straightforward with Ingram. I’m convinced he’s the brains behind the whole thing. Otherwise all of this doesn’t add up. But I don’t have a smoking gun, not yet, which makes the whole operation risky. There’s always a chance – though I wouldn’t bet on it – that the file the hacker downloaded has something specific on him. But it’s impossible to crack – a goddamn R.S.A. encryption.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Tighten the net. Show the world that our very own co-workers are in cahoots with criminal organizations.”

“Like the Spiders.”

“Like the Spiders. And plenty of other bad guys. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were involved in the killing of your professor in Stockholm. They had a clear interest in seeing him dead.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“I’m completely serious. Your professor knew things that could have blown up in their faces.”

“Holy shit. And you’re off to Stockholm like some private detective to investigate it all?”

“Not like a private detective, Alona. I’m going to be official, and while I’m there I’m going to give our hacker such a pummelling she won’t be able to stand.”

“Wait, Ed. Did I hear you say she?”

“You’d better believe it. Our hacker’s a she!”

August’s drawings took Salander back in time. She thought of that fist beating rhythmically and relentlessly on the mattress.

She remembered the thuds and the grunting and the crying from the bedroom next door. She remembered the times at Lundagatan when her comics and fantasies of revenge were her only refuge. But she shook off the memories. She changed the dressing on her shoulder. Then she checked her pistol, made sure that it was loaded. She went onto the P.G.P. link. Andrei Zander was asking how they were, and she gave a short reply.

Outside, the storm was shaking the trees and bushes. She helped herself to some whisky and a piece of chocolate, then went out onto the terrace and from there to the rock slope where she carefully reconnoitred the terrain, noticing a small cleft part way down. She counted her steps and memorized the lie of the land.

By the time she got back, August had made another drawing of Westman and the Roger person. She supposed he needed to get it out of his system. But still he had not drawn anything from the night of the murder. Perhaps the experience was blocked in his mind.

Salander was overcome by a feeling of time running away from them and she cast a worried look at August. For a minute or so she focused on the mind-boggling numbers he had put down on paper next to the new drawing. She studied their structure until suddenly she spotted a sequence which did not fit in with the others.

It was relatively short: 2305843008139952128. She got it immediately. It was not a prime number, it was – and here her spirits lifted – a number which, according to a perfect harmony, is made up of the sum of all its positive divisors. It was, in other words, a perfect number, just as 6 is because it can be divided by 3, 2 and 1 and 3 + 2 + 1 happen to add up to 6. She smiled. And then she had an exhilarating thought.

“Now you’re going to have to explain yourself,” Casales said.

“I will,” Needham said. “But first, even though I trust you, I need you to give me a solemn promise that you won’t say any of this to anybody.”

“I promise, you jerk.”

“Good. Here’s the story: after I yelled at Ingram, mostly for the sake of appearances, I told him he was right. I even pretended to be grateful to him for putting a stop to our investigation. We wouldn’t have gotten any further anyway, I said, and it was partly true. From a purely technical point of view we were out of options. We’d done everything and then some, but it was pointless. The hacker put red herrings all over the place and kept leading us into new mazes and labyrinths. One of my guys said that even if we got to the end, against all odds, we wouldn’t believe we’d made it. We’d just kid ourselves that it was a new trap. We were prepared for just about anything from this hacker, anything but flaws and weaknesses. So if we kept going the usual way we’d had it.”

“You don’t tend to go the usual way.”

“No, I prefer the roundabout way. The truth is, we hadn’t given up at all. We’d been talking to our hacker contacts out there and our friends in the software companies. We did advanced searches, surveillance and our own computer breaches. You see, when an attack is as complex as this one, you can always be sure there’s been some research up front. Certain specific questions have been asked. Certain specific sites have been visited and inevitably some of that becomes known to us. But there was one factor above all that played into our hands, Alona: the hacker’s skill. It was so incredible that it limited the number of suspects. Like a criminal suddenly running a hundred metres in 9.7 seconds at a crime scene – you’d be pretty sure the guy is a certain Mr Bolt or one of his close rivals, right?”

“So it’s at that level?”

“Well, there are parts of this attack that just made my jaw drop, and I’ve seen a fair amount in my day. That’s why we spent a hell of a lot of time talking to hackers and insiders in this industry and asking them who is capable of something really, really big? Who are the
seriously
big players these days? We had to be pretty smart about how we framed our questions, so that nobody would guess what actually happened. For a long time we got nowhere. It was like shooting in the dark – like calling out into the dead of night. Nobody knew anything, or they claimed they didn’t. A few names were mentioned, but none of them felt right. For a while we chased down some Russian, a Jurij Bogdanov – an ex-druggie and thief who apparently can hack into anything he damn well likes. The security companies were already trying to recruit him when he was living on the street in St Petersburg, hot-wiring cars, weighing in at forty kilos of skin and bone. Even the people from the police and intelligence services wanted him on their side. They lost that battle, needless to say. These days Bogdanov looks clean and successful and has ballooned to sixty kilos of skin and bone, but we’re pretty sure he’s one of the crooks in your organization, Alona. That was another reason he interested us. There had to be a connection to the Spiders, because of the searches that got carried out, but then …”

“You couldn’t understand why one of their own would be giving us new leads and associations?”

“Exactly, and so we looked further. After a while another outfit cropped up in the conversations.”

“Which one?”

“They call themselves Hacker Republic. They have a big reputation out there. A bunch of talents at the top of their game and rigorous about their encryptions. And for good reason. We’re constantly trying to infiltrate these groups, and we’re not the only ones. We don’t just want to find out what they’re up to, we also want to recruit their people. These days there’s big competition for the sharpest hackers.”

“Now that we’ve all become criminals.”

“Ha, yes, maybe. Whatever, Hacker Republic has major talent. Lots of the guys we talked to backed that up. And it wasn’t just that. There were also rumours that they had something big going on, and then a hacker with the handle Bob the Dog, who we think is linked to the gang, was running searches and asking questions about one of our guys, Richard Fuller. Do you know him?”

“No.”

“A manic-depressive self-righteous prick who’s been bugging me for a while. The archetypal security risk, who gets arrogant and sloppy when he’s in a manic phase. He’s just the kind of person a bunch of hackers
should
be targeting, and you’d need classified information to know that. His mental-health issues aren’t exactly common knowledge – his own mother hardly knows. But I’m pretty confident that in the end they didn’t get in via Fuller. We’ve examined every file he’s received recently and there’s nothing there. We’ve scrutinized him from top to bottom. But I bet Fuller was part of Hacker Republic’s original plan and then they changed strategy. I can’t claim to have any hard evidence against them, not at all, but my gut feeling is still that these guys are behind the break-in.”