The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (39 page)

She opened the archive in [Idiotic_Table]. It contained twenty-six documents.

Figuerola got up at 5:00 on Wednesday morning and went for an unusually short run before she showered and dressed in black jeans, a white top, and a lightweight grey linen jacket. She made coffee, poured it into a thermos, and then made sandwiches. She also strapped on a shoulder holster and took her Sig Sauer from the gun cabinet. Just after 6:00 she drove her white Saab 9–5 to Vittangigatan in Vällingby.

Mårtensson’s apartment was on the top floor of a three-storey building in the suburbs. The day before, she had assembled everything that could be found out about him in the public archives. He was unmarried, but that did not mean that he wasn’t living with someone. He had no black marks in police records, and no great fortune, and he did not seem to lead a fast life. He very seldom called in sick.

The one conspicuous thing about him was that he had licences for no fewer than sixteen weapons. Three of them were hunting rifles; the others were handguns of various types. As long as he had a licence, of course, there was no crime, but Figuerola harboured a deep scepticism about anyone who collected weapons on such a scale.

The Volvo with the registration beginning KAB was in the parking lot about thirty yards from where Figuerola herself parked. She poured black coffee into a paper cup and ate a lettuce and cheese baguette. Then she peeled an orange and sucked each segment to extinction.

At morning rounds, Salander was out of sorts and had a bad headache. She asked for a Tylenol, which she was immediately given.

After an hour the headache had grown worse. She rang for the nurse and asked for another Tylenol. That didn’t help either. By lunchtime she
had such a headache that the nurse called Dr. Endrin, who examined her patient briskly and prescribed a powerful painkiller.

Salander held the tablets under her tongue and spat them out as soon as she was alone.

At 2:00 in the afternoon she threw up. This recurred at around 3:00.

At 4:00 Jonasson came up to the ward just as Dr. Endrin was about to go home. They conferred briefly.

“She feels sick and she has a strong headache. I gave her Dexofen. I don’t understand what’s going on with her. She’s been doing so well lately. It might be some sort of flu . . .”

“Does she have a fever?” asked Jonasson.

“No. She had 98.6 an hour ago.”

“I’m going to keep an eye on her overnight.”

“I’ll be going on vacation for three weeks,” Endrin said. “Either you or Svantesson will have to take over her case. But Svantesson hasn’t had much to do with her. . . .”

“I’ll arrange to be her primary care doctor while you’re on vacation.”

“Good. If there’s a crisis and you need help, do call.”

They paid a short visit to Salander’s sickbed. She was lying with the sheet pulled up to the tip of her nose, and she looked miserable. Jonasson put his hand on her forehead and felt that it was damp.

“I think we’ll have to do a quick examination.”

He thanked Dr. Endrin, and she left.

At 5:00 Jonasson discovered that Salander had developed a temperature of 100, which was noted on her chart. He visited her three times that evening and noted that her temperature had remained at 100—too high, certainly, but not so high as to present a real problem. At 8:00 he ordered a cranial X-ray.

When the X-rays came through he studied them intently. He could not see anything remarkable, but he did observe that there was a barely visible darker area immediately adjacent to the bullet hole. He wrote a carefully worded and noncommittal comment on her chart:
Radiological examination gives a basis for definitive conclusions, but the condition of the patient has deteriorated steadily during the day. It cannot be ruled out that there is a minor bleed that is not visible on the images. The patient should be confined to bedrest and kept under strict observation until further notice
.

Berger had received twenty-three emails by the time she arrived at
SMP
at 6:30 on Wednesday morning.

One of them had the address . The text was short. A single word.

She raised her index finger to delete the message. At the last moment she changed her mind. She went back to her in-box and opened the message that had arrived two days before. The sender was . So . . . two emails with the word
whore
and a phoney sender from the world of mass media. She created a new folder called [Mediafool] and saved both messages. Then she got busy on the morning memo.

Mårtensson left home at 7:40 that morning. He got into his Volvo and drove towards the city but turned off to go across Stora Essingen and Gröndal into Södermalm. He drove down Hornsgatan and across to Bellmansgatan via Brännkyrkagatan. He turned left onto Tavastgatan at the Bishop’s Arms pub and parked at the corner.

Just as Figuerola reached the Bishop’s Arms, a van pulled out and left a parking space on Bellmansgatan at the corner with Tavastgatan. From her ideal location at the top of the hill she had an unobstructed view. She could just see the back window of Mårtensson’s Volvo. Straight ahead of her, on the steep slope down towards Pryssgränd, was Bellmansgatan 1. She was looking at the building from the side, so she could not see the front door itself, but as soon as anyone came out onto the street, she would see them. She had no doubt that this particular address was the reason for Mårtensson’s being there. It was Blomkvist’s building.

Figuerola could see that the area surrounding Bellmansgatan 1 would be a nightmare to keep under surveillance. The only spot from which the door to the building could be observed directly was from the promenade and footbridge on upper Bellmansgatan near the Maria lift and the Laurinska building. There was nowhere there to park a car, and the person doing the surveillance would stand exposed on the footbridge like a swallow perched on an old telephone wire in the country. The intersection of Bellmansgatan and Tavastgatan, where Figuerola had parked, was basically the only place where she could sit in her car and have a view of the whole. She had been incredibly lucky. Yet it was not a particularly good place because any alert observer would see her in her car. But she did not want to leave the car and start walking around the area. She was too easily noticeable. In her role as undercover officer her looks worked against her.

Blomkvist emerged at 9:10. Figuerola noted the time. She saw him look up at the footbridge on upper Bellmansgatan. He started up the hill straight towards her.

She opened her handbag and unfolded a map of Stockholm, which she placed on the passenger seat. Then she opened a notebook and took a pen from her jacket pocket. She pulled out her mobile and pretended to be talking, keeping her head bent so that the hand holding her phone hid part of her face.

She saw Blomkvist glance down Tavastgatan. He knew he was being watched and he must have seen Mårtensson’s Volvo, but he kept walking without showing any interest in the car.
Acts calm and cool. Somebody should have opened the car door and scared the shit out of him
.

The next moment he passed Figuerola’s car. She was obviously trying to find an address on the map while she talked on the phone, but she could sense Blomkvist looking at her as he passed.
Suspicious of everything around him
. She saw him in the side-view mirror on the passenger side as he went on down towards Hornsgatan. She had seen him on TV a couple of times, but this was the first time she had seen him in person. He was wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a grey jacket. He carried a shoulder bag and he walked with a long, loose stride. A nice-looking man.

Mårtensson appeared at the corner by the Bishop’s Arms and watched Blomkvist go. He had a large sports bag over his shoulder and was just finishing a call on his mobile. Figuerola expected him to follow his quarry, but to her surprise he crossed the street right in front of her car and turned down the hill towards Blomkvist’s building. A second later a man in blue overalls passed her car and caught up with Mårtensson.
Hello, where did you come from?

They stopped outside the door to Blomkvist’s building. Mårtensson punched in the code and they disappeared into the stairwell.
They’re checking the apartment. Amateur night. What the hell does he think he’s doing?

Then Figuerola raised her eyes to the rear-view mirror and gave a start when she saw Blomkvist again. He was standing about ten yards behind her, close enough that he could keep an eye on Mårtensson and his buddy by looking over the crest of the steep hill down towards Bellmansgatan 1. She watched his face. He was not looking at her. But he had seen Mârtensson go in through the front door of his building. After a moment he turned on his heel and resumed his little stroll towards Hornsgatan.

Figuerola sat motionless for thirty seconds.
He knows he’s being watched. He’s keeping track of what goes on around him. But why doesn’t he react? A
normal person would react, and pretty strongly at that. . . . He must have something up his sleeve
.

Blomkvist hung up and rested his gaze on the notebook on his desk. The national vehicle registry had just informed him that the car he had seen at the top of Bellmansgatan with the blonde woman inside was owned by Monica Figuerola, born in 1969, and living on Pontonjärgatan in Kungsholmen. Since it was a woman in the car, Blomkvist assumed it was Figuerola herself.

She had been talking on her mobile and looking at a map that was unfolded on the passenger seat. Blomkvist had no reason to believe that she had anything to do with the Zalachenko club, but he made a note of every deviation from the norm in his working day, and especially around his neighbourhood.

He called Karim in.

“Who is this woman, Lotta? Dig up her passport picture, where she works, and anything else you can find.”

Sellberg looked rather startled. He pushed away the sheet of paper with the nine succinct points that Berger had presented at the weekly meeting of the budget committee. Flodin looked similarly concerned. Borgsjö appeared neutral, as always.

“This is impossible,” Sellberg said with a polite smile.

“How so?” Berger said.

“The board will never go along with this. It defies all rhyme or reason.”

“Shall we take it from the top?” Berger said. “I was hired to make
SMP
profitable again. To do that I have to have something to work with, don’t you think?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“I can’t wave a magic wand and conjure up the contents of a daily newspaper by sitting in my glass cage and just wishing for things.”

“You don’t understand the hard economic facts.”

“That’s possible. But I understand making newspapers. And the reality is that over the past fifteen years,
SMP’s
personnel has been reduced by 118. Half were graphic artists and so on, replaced by new technology . . . but the number of reporters contributing to copy was reduced by 48 during that period.”

“Those were necessary cuts. If the staff hadn’t been cut, the paper would have folded long ago. At least Morander understood the necessity of the reductions.”

“Well, let’s wait and see what’s necessary and what isn’t. In three years, nineteen reporter jobs have disappeared. In addition, we now have a situation in which nine positions at
SMP
are vacant and are being to some extent covered by temps. The sports desk is dangerously understaffed. There should be nine employees there, and for more than a year two positions have remained unfilled.”

“It’s a question of saving money. It’s that simple.”

“The culture section has three unfilled positions. The business section has one. The legal desk does not even in practice exist; there we have a chief editor who borrows reporters from the news desk for each of his features. And so on.
SMP
hasn’t done any serious coverage of the civil service and government agencies for at least eight years. We depend for that on freelancers and the material from the TT wire service. And as you know, TT shut down its civil service desk some years ago. In other words, there isn’t a single news desk in Sweden covering the civil service and the government agencies.”

“The newspaper business is in a vulnerable position—”

“The reality is that
SMP
should either be shut down immediately, or the board should find a way to take an aggressive stance. Today we have fewer employees responsible for producing more copy every day. The articles they turn out are terrible, superficial, and they lack credibility. That’s why
SMP
is losing its readers.”

“You don’t understand the situation—”

“I’m tired of hearing that I don’t understand the situation. I’m not some temp who’s just here for the bus fare.”

“But your proposal is crazy.”

“Why is that?”

“You’re proposing that the newspaper should not be profitable.”

“Listen, Sellberg, this year you will be paying out a huge amount of money in dividends to the paper’s twenty-three stockholders. Add to this the unforgivably absurd bonuses that will cost
SMP
almost 10 million kronor for nine individuals who sit on
SMP
’s board. You’ve awarded yourself a bonus of 400,000 kronor for administering cutbacks. Of course, it’s a long way from being a bonus as huge as the ones that some of the directors of Skandia grabbed. But in my eyes you’re not worth a bonus of so much as one single öre. Bonuses should be paid to people who do something to
strengthen
SMP
. The plain truth is that your cutbacks have weakened
SMP
and deepened the crisis we now find ourselves in.”

“That is grossly unfair. The board approved every measure I proposed.”

“Of course the board approved your measures, because you guaranteed a dividend each year. That’s what has to stop, and now.”

“So you’re suggesting in all seriousness that the board should decide to abolish dividends and bonuses. What makes you think the stockholders would agree to that?”

“I’m proposing a zero-profit operating budget this year. That would mean savings of almost twenty-one million kronor and the chance to beef up
SMP’s
staff and finances. I’m also proposing wage cuts for management. I’m being paid a monthly salary of 88,000 kronor, which is utter insanity for a newspaper that can’t add a job to its sports desk.”