The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) (34 page)

“Did she blackmail him too?”

“Oh yes, but I don’t have the full story. He was so humiliated by Camilla that he wasn’t willing to tell me the truth, even when all was lost. Kjell had been the rock in our family. If we lost our way while out driving, if there was a flood, if any of us fell ill, he was the calm, sensible one. ‘It’ll all be alright,’ he would say in his wonderful voice – I still fantasize about it. But after a few years with Camilla in the house he was a wreck. Hardly dared to cross the road, looked a hundred times to make sure it was safe. And he lost all motivation at work, he just sat with his head hanging. One of his closest colleagues, Mats Hedlund, rang and told me in confidence that an inquiry had been set up to investigate whether Kjell had been selling company secrets. It sounded crazy. Kjell was the most honest man I’ve ever known. Plus if he’d sold anything, where was the money? We had less than ever. His bank account was stripped bare, same with our joint account.”

“Forgive my asking, but how did he die?”

“He hanged himself – without a word of explanation. I came home from work one day and found him swinging from the ceiling in the guest room, yes, the same room in which Camilla had had her fun with him. I was a well-paid C.F.O. at the time, and chances are I would have had a great career to look forward to. But after that, Moa’s and my world collapsed. I won’t go into it any further. You want to know what happened to Camilla. But there was no end to the misery. Moa started cutting herself and practically stopped eating. One day she asked me if I thought she was scum. ‘My God, darling,’ I replied, ‘how can you say something like that?’ Then she told me it was Camilla. That Camilla had claimed every single person who had ever met Moa thought she was repulsive. I sought all the help I could: psychologists, doctors, wise friends, Prozac. But to no avail. One gloriously beautiful spring day, when the rest of Sweden was celebrating some ridiculous triumph in the Eurovision Song Contest, Moa jumped from a ferry, and my life ended with hers – that’s how it felt. I no longer had the will to live and spent a long time in hospital being treated for depression. But then … I don’t know … somehow the paralysis and grief turned to rage, and I felt that I needed to understand. What had actually happened to our family? What sort of evil had seeped in? I started to make enquiries about Camilla, not because I wanted to see her again, not under any circumstances. But I wanted to understand her, the same way a parent of a murder victim wants to understand the murderer.”

“What did you discover?”

“Nothing to begin with. She had covered her tracks – it was like chasing a shadow, a phantom. I don’t know how many tens of thousands of kronor I spent on private detectives and other unreliable people who promised to help me. I was getting nowhere, and it was driving me crazy. I became fixated. I hardly slept, and none of my friends could bear to be with me any more. It was a terrible time. People thought I was being obsessive and stubborn, maybe they still do – I don’t know what Holger Palmgren told you. But then …”

“Go on.”

“Your story on Zalachenko was published. Naturally the name meant nothing to me, but I started to put two and two together. I read about his Swedish identity, Karl Axel Bodin, and about his connection with Svavelsjö Motorcycle Club, and then I remembered all the dreadful evenings towards the end, after Camilla had turned her back on us. At the time I was often woken up by the noise of motorbikes, and I could see those leather waistcoats with that awful emblem from my bedroom window. It didn’t surprise me that she mixed with those sorts of people. I no longer had any illusions about her. But I had no idea that this was the world she came from – and that she was expecting to take over her father’s business interests.”

“And did she?”

“Oh yes. In her own dirty world she fought for the rights of women – at least for her own rights – and I know that it meant a lot to many of the girls in the club, most of all to Kajsa Falk.”

“Who was she?”

“A sassy, lovely looking girl, her boyfriend was one of the leaders. She spent a lot of time at our home during that last year, and I remember liking her. She had big blue eyes with a slight squint, and a compassionate, vulnerable side behind her tough exterior. After reading your story I looked her up again. She didn’t say a word about Camilla, though she was by no means unpleasant. I noticed that her style had changed: the biker girl had become a businesswoman. But she didn’t talk about it. I thought I’d hit another dead end.”

“But it wasn’t?”

“No. About a year ago Kajsa looked me up of her own accord, and by then she had changed again. There was nothing reserved or cool about her. This time she was hounded and nervous. Not long after that she was found dead, shot at Stora Mossens sports centre in Bromma. When we met she told me there had been a dispute over the inheritance after Zalachenko’s death. Camilla’s twin sister, Lisbeth, came away more or less empty-handed – apparently she didn’t even want the little that she got – while the majority of the assets fell to Zalachenko’s two surviving sons in Berlin, and some to Camilla. She inherited part of the trafficking business you wrote about in your report, and that made my heart bleed. I doubt Camilla cared about those women, or felt any sort of compassion for them. But still, she didn’t want to have anything to do with those activities. She said to Kajsa that only losers bother with that sort of filth. She had a completely different, modern vision of what the organization should be doing, and after hard negotiation she got one of her half-brothers to buy her out. Then she disappeared to Moscow with her capital and some of the employees who wanted to follow her, Kajsa Falk among them.”

“Do you know what sort of business she was setting up?”

“Kajsa never got enough of an insight to understand it, but we had our suspicions. I think it was to do with those trade secrets at Ericsson. By now I’m almost certain Camilla really did get Kjell to steal and sell on something valuable, presumably by blackmailing him. I’ve also found out that in her first years with us she asked some computer geeks at school to hack into my computer. According to Kajsa, she was more or less obsessed with hacking. Not that she learned anything about it herself, not at all, but she was forever talking about the money one could make by accessing bank accounts and hacking servers and stealing information. She must have developed a business along those lines.”

“That sounds very possible.”

“It was probably at a very high level. Camilla would never settle for anything less. According to Kajsa, she soon found her way into influential circles in Moscow, and among other things became the mistress of some rich, powerful member of the Duma, and with him she began to forge connections with a strange crew of top engineers and criminals. She wound them round her little finger, and she knew exactly where the weak point in the domestic economy was.”

“And what was that?”

“The fact that Russia is little more than a petrol station with a flag on top. They export oil and natural gas, but manufacture nothing worth mentioning. Russia needs advanced technology.”

“She wanted to give them that?”

“That, at least, is what she pretended. But obviously she had her own agenda. I know that Kajsa was impressed by the way she built alliances with people and got herself political protection. She probably would have been loyal to Camilla for ever if she hadn’t become scared.”

“What was she scared of?”

“Kajsa got to know a former elite soldier – a major, I believe – and just lost her bearings. According to confidential information that Camilla had access to via her lover, the man had carried out a few shady operations for the Russian government. Among other things he had killed a well-known journalist, I presume you’ve heard of her, Irina Azarova. She’d taken a line against the government in various reports and books.”

“Oh yes, truly a heroine. A horrible story.”

“Absolutely. Something went wrong in the planning. Azarova was supposed to meet a critic of the regime in an apartment on a backstreet in a suburb south-east of Moscow, and according to the plan the major was supposed to shoot her as she came out. But no-one knew that the journalist’s sister had developed pneumonia, and Irina had to look after two nieces aged eight and ten. As she and the girls walked out of the front entrance the major shot all three of them in the face. After that he fell into disgrace – not that anybody was particularly bothered about the children, but public opinion was getting out of hand and there was a risk that the whole operation would be uncovered and turned against the government. I think the major was afraid he’d be made a scapegoat. He was also dealing with a load of personal problems at the same time. His wife took off, he was left alone with a teenage daughter and I believe there was even a possibility of his being evicted from his apartment. From Camilla’s perspective that was a perfect set-up: a ruthless person whom she could use, and who found himself in a vulnerable situation.”

“So she got him on board.”

“Yes, they met. Kajsa was there too, and the strange thing was that she immediately took a liking to this man. He wasn’t at all what she’d been expecting, nothing like the people she knew at Svavelsjö M.C., who were also killers. The man was very fit, very strong, and had a brutal look about him, but he was also cultivated and polite, she said, somehow vulnerable and sensitive. Kajsa could tell that he felt really terrible about shooting those children. He was a murderer, a man whose speciality had been torture during the war in Chechnya, but he still had his moral boundaries, she said, and that’s why she was so upset when Camilla got her claws into him – almost literally. She dragged her nails across his chest and hissed like a cat, ‘I want you to kill for me.’ Her words were charged with sexual tension, and with the skill of the devil she awakened the man’s sadism. The more gruesome his descriptions of his murders, the more excited she became. I’m not sure I understood it all, but it scared Kajsa to death. Not the murderer himself, but Camilla. Her beauty and allure managed to bring out the predator in him.”

“You never reported this to the police?”

“I asked Kajsa over and over. I told her she needed protection. She said she already had it and she forbade me to talk to the police. I was stupid enough to listen to her. After her death I told the investigators what I’d heard, but I doubt they believed me – presumably not. It was nothing but hearsay about a man without a name in another country. Camilla was nowhere to be found in any records, and I never discovered anything about her new identity. And certainly poor Kajsa’s murder is still unsolved.”

“I do understand how painful this must still be,” Blomkvist said.

“You do?”

“I think so,” he said, and was about to rest a sympathetic hand on her arm.

He was brought up short by his mobile buzzing in his pocket. He hoped it was Zander. But it was Stefan Molde. It took Blomkvist a few seconds to identify him as the person at the N.D.R.E. who had been in touch with Linus Brandell.

“What’s this about?” he said.

“A meeting with a senior civil servant who’s on his way to Sweden. He wants to see you as early as possible tomorrow morning at the Grand Hôtel.”

Blomkvist made an apologetic gesture in Fru Dahlgren’s direction.

“I have a tight schedule,” he said, “So if I’m to meet anybody, at the very least I want a name and an explanation.”

“The man’s name is Edwin Needham, and it’s about someone using the handle Wasp, who is suspected of serious crimes.”

Blomkvist felt a wave of panic. “O.K.,” he said. “What time?”

“Five o’clock tomorrow morning would work.”

“You’ve got to be joking!”

“Regrettably there’s nothing to joke about in all this. I suggest that you’re punctual. Mr Needham will see you in his room. You’ll have to leave your mobile at reception, and you’ll be searched.”

Blomkvist got to his feet and took his leave of Margareta Dahlgren.

24.xi – 3.xii

Sometimes it is easier to put together than to put asunder.

Nowadays computers can easily multiply prime numbers with millions of digits. Yet it is extremely complicated to reverse the process. Numbers with only a few hundred digits present huge problems.

Encryption algorithms like R.S.A. take advantage of the difficulties involved in prime-number factorization. Prime numbers have become secrecy’s best friends.

24.xi, Early Morning

It had not taken long for Salander to identify the Roger whom August had been drawing. She had seen a younger version of the man on a website showing former actors from Revolutionsteatern in Vasastan. He was called Roger Winter. He had had a couple of major film roles at the beginning of his career, but lately had fetched up in a backwater, and was now less well known than his wheelchair-bound brother Tobias, an outspoken professor of biology who was said these days to have distanced himself altogether from Roger.

Salander wrote down Roger Winter’s address and then hacked into the supercomputer N.S.F. M.R.I. She also opened the program with which she was trying to construct a dynamic system for finding the elliptic curves which were most likely to do the job, and with as few iterations as possible. But whatever she tried, she was unable to get any closer to a solution. The N.S.A. file remained impenetrable. In the end she went and looked in on August. She swore. The boy was awake, sitting up in bed writing something on a piece of paper, and as she came closer she could see that he was doing more prime-number factorizations.

“It’s no good. It’s not getting us anywhere,” she muttered, and when August began to rock to and fro hysterically once again she told him to pull himself together and go back to sleep.

It was late and she decided that she too should rest for a while. She took the bed next to his, but it was impossible to sleep. August tossed and turned and whimpered, and in the end Salander decided to say something, to try to settle him. The best she could think of was, “Do you know about elliptic curves?”

Of course she got no answer. That did not deter her from giving as simple and clear an explanation as she could.

“Do you get it?” she said.

August did not reply.

“O.K., then,” she went on. “Take the number 3,034,267, for example. I know you can easily find its prime-number factors. But it can also be done using elliptic curves. Let’s for example take curve
and point P = (1.2) on that curve.”

She wrote the equation on a piece of paper on the bedside table. But August did not seem to be following at all. She thought about those autistic twins she had read up on. They had some mysterious way of identifying large prime numbers, yet could not solve the simplest equations. Perhaps August was like that too. Perhaps he was more of a calculating machine than a genuine mathematical talent, and in any case it didn’t matter right now. Her bullet wound was aching again and she needed some sleep. She needed to drive out all her old childhood demons which had come to life again because of the boy.

It was past midnight by the time Blomkvist got home and, even though he was exhausted and had to get up at the crack of dawn, he sat down at his computer and Googled Edwin Needham. There were quite a few Edwin Needhams in the world, including a successful rugby player who had made an extraordinary comeback having had leukaemia.

There was one Edwin Needham who seemed to be an expert on water purification, and another who was good at getting himself into society photographs and looking daft. But none of them seemed right for someone who could have been involved in cracking Wasp’s identity and accusing her of criminal activity. There was an Edwin Needham who was a computer engineer with a Ph.D. from M.I.T., and that was at least the right line of business, but not even he seemed to fit. He was now a senior executive at Safeline, a leading business in computer virus protection, and that company would certainly have an interest in hackers. But the statements made by this Ed, as he was known, were all about market share and new products. Nothing he said rated higher than the usual clichéd sales talk, not even when he got the chance to talk about his leisure pursuits: bowling and fly fishing. He loved nature, he said, he loved the competitive aspect … The most threatening thing he seemed capable of doing was boring people to death.

There was a picture of him, grinning and bare-chested, holding up a large salmon, the sort of snap which are a dime a dozen in fishing circles. It was as dull as everything else, and yet gradually Blomkvist began to wonder whether the dullness might not be the whole point. He read through the material again and this time it struck him as something concocted, a facade. Slowly but surely he came to the opposite conclusion: this was the man. You could smell the intelligence services a mile off, couldn’t you? It felt like N.S.A. or C.I.A. Once again he looked at the photograph with the salmon, and this time he thought he saw something very different.

He saw a tough guy putting on an act. There was something unwavering about the way he stood and his mocking grin into the camera, at least that is what Blomkvist imagined, and again he thought of Salander. He wondered if he ought to tell her about this meeting. But there was no reason to worry her now, especially since he did not actually know anything, so instead he decided to go to bed. He needed to sleep for a few hours and have a clear head when he met Needham in the morning. As he slowly brushed his teeth and undressed and climbed into bed, he realized he was more tired than he could have imagined and fell asleep in no time. He dreamed that he was being dragged under and almost drowned in the river Needham had been standing in. Afterwards he had a vague image of himself crawling along the riverbed surrounded by flopping, thrashing salmon. But he cannot have slept for long. He woke with a start and the growing conviction that he had overlooked something. His mobile was lying on the bedside table and his thoughts turned to Zander. The young man must have been on his mind all along.

Linda had double-locked the door. There was nothing odd about that – a woman in her situation had to take all possible precautions. It still made Zander feel uncomfortable, but he put that down to the apartment, or so he tried to convince himself. It was not at all what he had been expecting. Could this really be the home of one of her girlfriends?

The bed was broad but not especially long, and both the headboard and the footboard were made of shiny steel latticework. The bedspread was black, which made him think of a bier, and he disliked the pictures on the walls – mostly framed photographs of men with weapons. There was a sterile, chilly feel to the whole place.

On the other hand he was probably just nervous and exaggerating everything, or looking for an excuse to get away. A man always wants to escape the thing he loves – hadn’t Oscar Wilde said something like that? He looked at Linda. Never before had he seen such an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and now she was coming towards him in her tight blue dress which accentuated her figure. As if she had been reading his mind she said, “Would you rather go home, Andrei?”

“I do have quite a lot on my plate.”

“I understand,” she said, kissing him. “Then you must of course go and get on with your work.”

“Maybe that would be best,” he muttered as she pressed herself against him, kissing him with such force that he had no defence.

He responded to her kiss and put his hands on her hips, and she gave him a shove. She pushed him so hard that he staggered and fell backwards onto the bed, and for a moment he was scared. But then he looked at her. She was smiling as tenderly now as before and he thought: this was nothing more than a bit of rough play. She really wanted him, didn’t she? She wanted to make love with him there and then, and he let her straddle his body, unbutton his shirt, and draw her fingernails over his stomach while her eyes shone with an intense glow and her large breasts heaved beneath her dress. Her mouth was open. A trickle of saliva ran down her chin and she whispered something he could not at first hear. “Now, Andrei,” she whispered again. “Now!”

“Now?” he repeated uncertainly, and felt her tearing off his trousers. She was more brazen than he had expected, more accomplished and wildly lascivious than anybody he had met.

“Close your eyes and lie absolutely still,” she said.

He obeyed and could hear her fiddling with something, he was not sure what. Then heard a click and felt metal around his wrists, and realized he had been handcuffed. He was about to protest, he did not really go in for that sort of thing, but it all happened so fast. With lightning speed, as if she had done it many times, she locked his hands to the headboard. Then she bound his feet with rope and pulled tight.

“Gently,” he said.

“Don’t worry,” but then she gave him a look he did not like and said something in a solemn voice. He must have misheard. “
What
?” he said.

“I’m going to cut you with a knife, Andrei,” she said, and fixed a broad piece of tape across his mouth.

Blomkvist was trying to tell himself not to worry. Why would anything have happened to Zander? No-one – apart from Berger and himself – knew that he was involved in protecting the whereabouts of Salander and the boy. They had been extremely careful with that piece of information, more careful than with any other part of the story. And yet … why had there been no word from him?

Zander was not someone who ignored his mobile. On the contrary, he normally picked up on the first ring whenever Blomkvist called. But now there was no way of getting hold of him, and that was strange, wasn’t it? Or maybe … again Blomkvist tried to convince himself that Zander was busy working and had lost track of time, or in the worst case had dropped his mobile. That was probably all it was. But still … after all these years Camilla had appeared out of nowhere. Something must be going on, and what was it Bublanski had said?

“
We live in a world in which paranoia is a requirement
.”

Blomkvist reached for the telephone on the bedside table and called Zander again. He got no answer this time either, so decided to wake their new staff member, Emil Grandén, who lived near Zander in the Röda bergen area of Vasastan. Grandén sounded less than enthusiastic but promised to go over to Zander’s right away to see if he was there. Twenty minutes later he rang back. He had been banging on Zander’s door for a while, he said, and he definitely wasn’t at home.

Blomkvist got dressed and left his apartment, hurrying through a deserted and storm-lashed Södermalm district up to the magazine offices on Götgatan. With any luck, he thought, Zander would be lying asleep on the sofa. It would not be the first time he had nodded off at work and not heard the telephone. That would be the simple explanation. But Blomkvist felt more and more uneasy. When he opened the door and turned off the alarm he shivered, as if expecting to find a scene of devastation, but after a search of the premises he found no trace of anything untoward. All the information on his encrypted email program had been carefully deleted, just as they had agreed. It all looked as it should, but there was no Zander lying on the office sofa, which was looking as shabby and empty as ever. For a short while Blomkvist sat there, lost in thought. Then he rang Grandén again.

“Emil,” he said, “I’m sorry to harass you like this in the middle of the night. But this whole story has made me paranoid.”

“I can understand that.”

“I couldn’t help hearing that you sounded a bit stressed when I was talking about Andrei. Is there anything you haven’t told me?”

“Nothing you don’t already know,” Grandén said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I’ve spoken to the Data Inspection Authority too.”

“What do you mean, you too?”

“You mean you haven’t—”

“No!” Blomkvist cut him short and heard Grandén’s breathing at the other end of the line become laboured. There had been a terrible mistake.

“Out with it, Emil, and fast,” he said.

“So …”

“Yes?”

“I had a call from a Lina Robertsson at the Data Inspection Authority. She said that you’d spoken and she agreed to raise the level of security on your computer, given the circumstances. Apparently the recommendations she’d given you were wrong and she was worried the protection would be insufficient. She said she wanted to get hold of the person who’d arranged the encryption for you asap.”

“And what did you say?”

“That I knew nothing about it, except that I’d seen Andrei doing something at your computer.”

“So you said she should get in touch with Andrei.”

“I happened to be out at the time and told her that Andrei was probably still in the office. She could ring him there, I said. That was all.”

“Jesus, Emil.”

“But she sounded really—”

“I don’t care how she sounded. I just hope you told Andrei about the call.”

“Maybe not right away. I’m pretty snowed under at the moment, like all of us.”

“But you told him later.”

“Well, he left the office before I got a chance to say anything.”

“So you called him instead.”

“Absolutely, several times. But …”

“Yes?”

“He didn’t answer.”

“O.K.,” Blomkvist said, his voice ice cold.

He hung up and dialled Bublanski’s number. He had to try twice before the chief inspector came to the telephone. Blomkvist had no choice but to tell him the whole story – without discussing Salander and August’s location.

Then he called Berger.

Salander had fallen asleep, but she was still ready for action. She was still in her clothes, with her leather jacket and her boots on. She kept waking up, either because of the howling storm or because August was moaning even in his sleep. But each time she dropped off again, or at least dozed, and had short, strangely realistic dreams.