The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (19 page)

“OK,” Armansky said. “Everyone’s here. I’m all ears.”

Blomkvist stood at Armansky’s whiteboard and picked up a marker. He looked around.

“This is probably the craziest thing I’ve ever been involved with,” he said. “When this is all over I’m going to found an association called ‘The Knights of the Idiotic Table,’ and its purpose will be to arrange an annual dinner where we tell stories about Lisbeth Salander. You’re all members.”

He paused.

“So, this is how things really are,” he said, and he began to make a list of headings on Armansky’s whiteboard. He talked for a good thirty minutes. Afterwards, the discussion went on for almost three hours.

Gullberg sat down next to Clinton when their meeting was over. They spoke in low voices for a few minutes before Gullberg stood up. The old comrades shook hands.

Gullberg took a taxi to Freys, packed his briefcase, and checked out. He took the late-afternoon train to Göteborg. He chose first class and had the compartment to himself. When he passed Årstabron he took out a ballpoint pen and a notepad. He thought for a long while and then began to write. He filled half a page before he stopped and tore the sheet off the pad.

Forged documents had never been his department or his expertise, but here the task was simplified by the fact that the letters he was writing would be signed by him. What complicated the issue was that not a word of what he was writing was true.

By the time the train went through Nyköping he had already discarded a number of drafts, but he was starting to get a sense for how the letters should be phrased. When they arrived in Göteborg he had twelve letters he was satisfied with. He made sure he had left clear fingerprints on each sheet.

At Göteborg Central Station he tracked down a photocopier and made copies of the letters. Then he bought envelopes and stamps and posted the letters in a box with a 9:00 p.m. collection.

Gullberg took a taxi to City Hotel on Lorensbergsgatan, where Clinton had already booked a room for him. It was the same hotel Blomkvist had spent the night in several days before. He went straight to his room and sat on the bed. He was completely exhausted and realized that he had eaten only two slices of bread all day. Yet he was not hungry. He undressed, stretched out in bed, and fell asleep almost at once.

•    •    •

Salander woke with a start when she heard the door open. She knew right away that it was not one of the night nurses. She opened her eyes to two narrow slits and saw a silhouette with crutches in the doorway. Zalachenko was watching her in the light that came from the corridor.

Without moving her head she glanced at the digital clock: 3:10 a.m.

She then glanced at the bedside table and saw the water glass. She calculated the distance. She could just reach it without having to move her body.

It would take a few seconds to stretch out her arm and break off the rim of the glass with a firm rap against the hard edge of the table. It would take half a second to shove the broken edge into Zalachenko’s throat if he leaned over her. She looked for other options, but the glass was her only reachable weapon.

She relaxed and waited.

Zalachenko stood in the doorway for two minutes without moving. Then gingerly he closed the door.

She heard the faint scraping of the crutches as he quietly retreated down the corridor.

Five minutes later she propped herself up on her right elbow, reached for the glass, and took a long drink of water. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed. With effort she stood up, pulled the electrodes off her arms and chest, and swayed unsteadily. It took her a few seconds to gain control over her body. She hobbled to the door and leaned against the wall to catch her breath. She was in a cold sweat. Then she turned icy with rage.

Fuck you, Zalachenko. Let’s end this right here and now
.

She needed a weapon.

The next moment she heard quick heels clacking in the corridor.

Shit. The electrodes
.

“What in God’s name are you doing up?” the night nurse said.

“I had to . . . go . . . to the toilet,” Salander said breathlessly.

“Get back into bed at once.”

She took Salander’s hand and helped her into the bed. Then she got a bedpan.

“When you have to go to the toilet, just ring for us. That’s what this button is for.”

Blomkvist woke up at 10:30 on Tuesday, showered, put on coffee, and then sat down with his iBook. After the meeting at Milton Security the previous evening, he had come home and worked until 5:00 a.m. The story was
finally beginning to take shape. Zalachenko’s biography was still vague—all he had was what he had blackmailed Björck to reveal, as well as the handful of details Palmgren had been able to provide. Salander’s story was pretty much done. He explained step by step how she had been targeted by a gang of Cold War mongers at SIS and locked away in a psychiatric hospital to stop her from blowing the whistle on Zalachenko.

He was pleased with what he had written. There were still some holes that he would have to fill, but he knew that he had one hell of a story. It would be a news sensation, and there would be volcanic eruptions high up in the government bureaucracy.

He smoked a cigarette while he thought.

He could see two particular gaps that needed attention. One was manageable. He had to deal with Teleborian, and he was looking forward to that assignment. When he was finished with him, the renowned children’s psychiatrist would be one of the most detested men in Sweden. That was one thing.

The second thing was more complicated.

The men who conspired against Salander—he thought of them as the Zalachenko club—were inside the Security Police. He knew one, Gunnar Björck, but Björck could not possibly be the only man responsible. There had to be a group . . . a division or unit of some sort. There must be chiefs, operations managers. There had to be a budget. But he had no idea how to go about identifying these people, where even to start. He had only the vaguest notion of how Säpo was organized.

On Monday he had begun his research by sending Cortez to the secondhand bookshops on Södermalm, to buy every book which in any way dealt with the Security Police. Cortez had come to his apartment in the afternoon with six books:
Espionage in Sweden
by Mikael Rosquist (Tempus, 1988);
Säpo Chief 1962–1970
by P. G. Vinge (Wahlström & Widstrand, 1988);
Secret Forces
by Jan Ottosson and Lars Magnusson (Tiden, 1991);
Power Struggle for Säpo
by Erik Magnusson (Corona, 1989);
An Assignment
by Carl Lidbom (Wahlström & Widstrand, 1990); and—somewhat surprisingly—
An Agent in Place
by Thomas Whiteside (Viking, 1966), which dealt with the Wennerström affair. The Wennerström affair of the sixties, not Blomkvist’s own much more recent Wennerström affair.

He had spent much of Monday night and the early hours of Tuesday morning reading or at least skimming the books. When he had finished he made some observations. First, most of the books published about the Security Police were from the late eighties. An Internet search showed that there was hardly any current literature on the subject.

Second, there did not seem to be any intelligible basic overview of the activities of the Swedish secret police over the years. This may have been because many documents were stamped TOP SECRET and were therefore off limits, but there did not seem to be any single institution, researcher, or media that had carried out a critical examination of Säpo.

He also noticed another odd thing: there was no bibliography in any of the books Cortez had found. On the other hand, the footnotes often referred to articles in the evening newspapers, or to interviews with some old, retired Säpo hand.

The book
Secret Forces
was fascinating but largely dealt with the time before and during the Second World War. Blomkvist regarded P. G. Vinge’s memoir as propaganda, written in self-defence by a severely criticized Säpo chief who was eventually fired.
An Agent in Place
contained so much inaccurate information about Sweden in the first chapter that he threw the book into the wastepaper basket. The only two books with any real ambition to portray the work of the Security Police were
Power Struggle for Säpo
and
Espionage in Sweden
. They contained data, names, and organizational charts. He found Magnusson’s book to be especially worthwhile reading. Even though it did not offer any answers to his immediate questions, it provided a good account of Säpo as a structure, as well as of its primary concerns over several decades.

The biggest surprise was Lidbom’s
An Assignment
, which described the problems encountered by the former Swedish ambassador to France when he was commissioned to examine Säpo in the wake of the Palme assassination and the Ebbe Carlsson affair. Blomkvist had never before read anything by Lidbom, and he was taken aback by the sarcastic tone combined with razor-sharp observations. But even Lidbom’s book brought Blomkvist no closer to an answer to his questions, even if he was beginning to get an idea of what he was up against.

He opened his mobile and called Cortez.

“Hi, Henry. Thanks for the legwork yesterday.”

“What do you need now?”

“A little more legwork.”

“Micke, I hate to say this, but I have a job to do. I’m managing editor now.”

“An excellent career advancement.”

“What is it that you want?”

“Over the years there have been a number of public reports on Säpo. Carl Lidbom did one. There must be several others like it.”

“I see.”

“Order everything you can find from Parliament: budgets, public reports, interpellations, and the like. And get Säpo’s annual reports as far back as you can find them.”

“Yes, master.”

“Good man. And, Henry . . .”

“Yes?”

“I don’t need them until tomorrow.”

Salander spent the whole day brooding about Zalachenko. She knew that he was only two doors away, that he wandered in the corridors at night, and that he had come to her room at 3:10 that morning.

She had tracked him to Gosseberga fully intending to kill him. She had failed, with the result that Zalachenko was alive and tucked into bed just thirty feet from where she was. And she was in hot water. She could not tell how bad the situation was, but she supposed that she would have to escape and discreetly disappear abroad herself if she did not want to risk being locked up in some nuthouse again with Teleborian as her keeper.

The problem was that she could scarcely sit upright in bed. She did notice improvements. The headache was still there, but it came in waves instead of being constant. The pain in her left shoulder had subsided a bit, but it resurfaced whenever she tried to move.

She heard footsteps outside the door and saw a nurse open it to admit a woman wearing black pants, a white blouse, and a dark jacket. She was pretty, slender, with dark hair in a boyish hairstyle. She radiated a cheerful confidence. She was carrying a black briefcase. Salander saw at once that she had the same eyes as Blomkvist.

“Hello, Lisbeth. I’m Annika Giannini,” she said. “May I come in?”

Salander studied her without expression. All of a sudden she did not have the slightest desire to meet Blomkvist’s sister and regretted that she had accepted this woman as her lawyer.

Giannini came in, shut the door behind her, and pulled up a chair. She sat there for some time, looking at her client.

The girl looked terrible. Her head was wrapped in bandages. She had purple bruises around her bloodshot eyes.

“Before we begin to discuss anything, I have to know whether you really do want me to be your lawyer. Normally I’m involved in civil cases, in which I represent victims of rape or domestic violence. I’m not a criminal defence lawyer. I have, however, studied the details of your case, and I would very much like to represent you, if I may. I should also tell you that
Mikael Blomkvist is my brother—I think you already know that—and that he and Dragan Armansky are paying my fee.”

She paused, but when she got no response she continued.

“If you want me to be your lawyer, it’s you I will be working for. Not for my brother or for Armansky. I have to tell you too that I will receive advice and support during any trial from your former guardian, Holger Palmgren. He’s tough, and he dragged himself out of his sickbed to help you.”

“Palmgren?”

“Yes.”

“Have you seen him?”

“Yes.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He’s absolutely furious, but strangely he doesn’t seem to be at all worried about you.”

Salander smiled lopsidedly. It was the first time she had smiled at Sahlgrenska hospital. “How are you feeling?”

“Like a sack of shit.”

“Well then. Do you want me to be your lawyer?”

“Yes. But I’ll pay your fee myself. I don’t want a single öre from Armansky or Kalle Blomkvist. But I can’t pay before I have access to the Internet.”

“I understand. We’ll deal with that problem when it arises. In any case, the state will be paying most of my salary. I’ll get started by giving you a message from Mikael. It sounds a little cryptic, but he says you’ll know what he means.”

“Oh?”

“He wants you to know that he’s told me most of the story, except for a few details, of which the first concerns the skills he discovered in Hedestad.”

He knows that I have a photographic memory . . . and that I’m a hacker. He’s kept quiet about that
.

“OK.”

“The other is the DVD. I don’t know what he’s referring to, but he was adamant that it’s up to you to decide whether you tell me about it or not. Do you know what he’s referring to?”

The film of Bjurman raping me
.

“Yes.”

“That’s good, then.” Giannini was suddenly hesitant. “I’m a little miffed at my brother. Even though he hired me, he’ll only tell me what he feels like telling me. Do you intend to hide things from me too?”

“I don’t know. Could we leave that question for later?” Salander said.

“Certainly. We’re going to be talking to each other quite a lot. I don’t have time for a long conversation now—I have to meet Prosecutor Jervas in forty-five minutes. I just wanted to confirm that you really do want me to be your lawyer. But there’s something else I need to tell you.”