The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (45 page)

They rejected marriage as subjugation. So that they might have children they were granted a leave of absence, during which they copulated with randomly selected males from nearby towns.

Only a woman who had killed a man in battle was allowed to give up her virginity.

Blomkvist left the
Millennium
offices at 10:30 on Friday night. He took the stairs down to the ground floor, but instead of going out onto the street he turned left and went through the basement, across the inner courtyard, and through the building behind theirs onto Hökens Gata. He ran into a group of youths on their way from Mosebacke, but no-one seemed to be paying him any attention. Anyone watching the building would think that he was spending the night at
Millennium
, as he often did. He had established that pattern as early as April. Actually it was Malm who had the night shift.

He spent fifteen minutes walking down the alleys and boulevards around Mosebacke before he headed for Fiskargatan 9. He opened the door using the code and took the stairs to the top-floor apartment, where he used Salander’s keys to get in. He turned off the alarm. He always felt a bit bemused when he went into the apartment: twenty-one rooms, of which only three were furnished.

He made coffee and sandwiches before he went into Salander’s office and booted up her PowerBook.

From the moment in mid-April when Björck’s report was stolen and Blomkvist realized he was under surveillance, he had established his own headquarters at Salander’s apartment. He had transferred the most crucial documentation to her desk. He spent several nights a week at the apartment, slept in her bed, and worked on her computer. She had wiped her hard drive clean before she left for Gosseberga and the confrontation with Zalachenko. Blomkvist supposed that she had not planned to come back. He had used her system disks to restore her computer to a functioning state.

Since April he had not even plugged in the broadband cable to his own machine. He logged on to her broadband connection, started up the ICQ chat programme, and pinged up the address she had created for him through the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table].

Blomkvist logged in to ICQ and went into the newly created Yahoo group [The_Knights]. All he found was a link from Plague to an anonymous URL which consisted solely of numbers. He copied the address into Explorer, hit the Return key, and came to a website somewhere on the Internet that contained the sixteen gigabytes of Ekström’s hard drive.

Plague had obviously made it simple for himself by copying over Ekström’s entire hard drive, and Blomkvist spent more than an hour sorting through its contents. He ignored the system files, software, and endless files containing preliminary investigations that seemed to stretch back several years. He downloaded four folders. Three of them were called [PrelimInv/Salander], [Slush/Salander], and [PrelimInv/Niedermann]. The fourth was a copy of Ekström’s email folder made at 2:00 p.m. the previous day.

“Thanks, Plague,” Blomkvist said to himself.

He spent three hours reading through Ekström’s preliminary investigation and strategy for the trial. Not surprisingly, much of it dealt with Salander’s mental state. Ekström wanted an extensive psychiatric examination and had sent a lot of messages with the object of getting her transferred to Kronoberg prison as a matter of urgency.

Blomkvist could tell that Ekström was making no headway in his search for Niedermann. Bublanski was the leader of that investigation. He had succeeded in gathering some forensic evidence linking Niedermann to the murders of Svensson and Johansson, as well as to the murder of Bjurman. Blomkvist’s own three long interviews in April had set them on the trail of this evidence. If Niedermann were ever apprehended, Blomkvist would have to be a witness for the prosecution. At long last DNA from sweat droplets and two hairs from Bjurman’s apartment were matched to items from Niedermann’s room in Gosseberga. The same DNA was found in abundant quantities on the remains of Svavelsjö MC’s Göransson.

On the other hand, Ekström had remarkably little on the record about Zalachenko.

Blomkvist lit a cigarette and stood by the window looking out towards Djurgården.

Ekström was leading two separate preliminary investigations. Criminal Inspector Faste was the investigative leader in all matters dealing with Salander. Bublanski was working only on Niedermann.

When the name Zalachenko turned up in the preliminary investigation, the logical thing for Ekström to do would have been to contact the general director of the Security Police to determine who Zalachenko actually was. Blomkvist could find no such enquiry in Ekström’s email, journal, or notes. But among the notes Blomkvist found several cryptic sentences.

The Salander investigation is fake. Björck’s original doesn’t match Blomkvist’s version. Classify Top Secret
.

Then a series of notes claiming that Salander was paranoid and a schizophrenic.

Correct to lock up Salander 1991
.

He found what linked the investigations in the Salander slush, that is, the supplementary information that the prosecutor considered irrelevant to the preliminary investigation, and which would therefore not be presented at the trial or make up part of the chain of evidence against her. This included almost everything that had to do with Zalachenko’s background.

The investigation was totally inadequate.

Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence and to what extent it was contrived. Where was the boundary? And was Ekström aware that there was a boundary?

Could it be that someone was deliberately supplying Ekström with believable but misleading information?

Finally Blomkvist logged into Hotmail and spent ten minutes checking the half-dozen anonymous email accounts he had created. Each day he had checked the address he had given to Criminal Inspector Modig. He had no great hope that she would contact him, so he was mildly surprised when he opened the in-box and found an email from . The message consisted of a single line:

Plague pinged Salander at midnight and interrupted her in the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time with Holger Palmgren as her guardian. She cast an irritated glance at the display.

Salander disconnected from Plague and accessed the server he had directed her to. She spent nearly three hours scrutinizing folder after folder on Teleborian’s computer.

She found correspondence between Teleborian and a person with a Hotmail address who sent encrypted email. Since she had access to Teleborian’s PGP key, she easily decoded the correspondence. His name was Jonas, no last name. Jonas and Teleborian had an unhealthy interest in seeing that Salander did not thrive.

Yes, we can prove that there is a conspiracy
.

But what really interested Salander were the forty-seven folders containing close to 9,000 photographs of explicit child pornography. She clicked on image after image of children aged about fifteen or younger. A number of pictures were of infants. The majority were of girls. Many of them were sadistic.

She found links to at least a dozen people abroad who traded child porn with one another.

Salander bit her lip, but her face was otherwise expressionless.

She remembered the nights when, as a twelve-year-old, she had been strapped down in a stimulus-free room at St. Stefan’s. Teleborian had come into the room again and again to look at her in the glow of the night light.

She knew. He had never touched her, but she had always known.

She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.

After a while she pinged Blomkvist on ICQ.

Blomkvist spent the night at Salander’s apartment on Fiskargatan. He did not shut down the computer until 6:30 a.m. and fell asleep with photographs of gross child pornography whirling through his mind. He woke at 10:15 and rolled out of Salander’s bed, showered, and called a taxi to pick him up outside Södra theatre. He got out at Birger Jarlsgatan at 10:55 and walked to Café Madeleine.

Modig was waiting for him with a cup of black coffee in front of her.

“Hi,” Blomkvist said.

“I’m taking a big risk here,” she said without greeting.

“Nobody will hear of our meeting from me.”

She seemed stressed.

“One of my colleagues recently went to see former prime minister Fälldin. He went there on his own initiative, and his job is on the line now too.”

“I understand.”

“I need a guarantee of anonymity for both of us.”

“I don’t even know which colleague you’re talking about.”

“I’ll tell you later. I want you to promise to give him protection as a source.”

“You have my word.”

She looked at her watch.

“Are you in a hurry?”

“Yes. I have to meet my husband and kids at the Sturegallerian in ten minutes. He thinks I’m still at work.”

“And Bublanski knows nothing about this?”

“No.”

“Right. You and your colleague are sources and you have complete source protection. Both of you. As long as you live.”

“My colleague is Jerker Holmberg. You met him down in Göteborg. His father is a Centre Party member, and Jerker has known Prime Minister Fälldin since he was a child. He seems to be pleasant enough. So Jerker went to see him and asked about Zalachenko.”

Blomkvist’s heart began to pound.

“Jerker asked Fälldin what he knew about the defection, but Fälldin didn’t reply. When Holmberg told him that we suspect Salander was locked up by the people who were protecting Zalachenko, well, that really upset him.”

“Did he say how much he knew?”

“Fälldin told him that the chief of Säpo at the time and a colleague came to visit him very soon after he became prime minister. They told a fantastic story about a Russian defector who had come to Sweden, told him that it was the most sensitive military secret Sweden possessed, that there was nothing in Swedish military intelligence that was anywhere near as important. Fälldin said he didn’t know how to handle it, that there was no-one with much experience in government, the Social Democrats having been in power for more than forty years. He was advised that he alone had to make the decisions, and that if he discussed it with his government colleagues then Säpo would wash their hands of it. He remembered the whole thing as being very unpleasant.”

“What
did
he do?”

“He realized he had no choice but to do what the gentlemen from Säpo
proposed. He issued a directive putting Säpo in sole charge of the defector. He pledged never to discuss the matter with anyone. Fälldin was never ever told Zalachenko’s name.”

“Extraordinary.”

“After that he heard almost nothing more during his two terms in office. But he did do something extremely shrewd. He insisted that an undersecretary of state be let in on the secret, in case there was a need for a go-between for the government secretariat and those who were protecting Zalachenko.”

“Did he remember who it was?”

“It was Bertil K. Janeryd, now Swedish ambassador in The Hague. When it was explained to Fälldin how serious this preliminary investigation was, he sat down and wrote to Janeryd.”

Modig pushed an envelope across the table.

“This letter is referring to Holmberg?”

“No. Jerker asked Fälldin not to put in a name. He said that he couldn’t know who would be going to The Hague.”

“You mean . . . ?”

“Jerker and I have discussed it. We’re already out on ice so thin that we’ll need paddles rather than ice picks. We have no authority to travel to Holland to interview the ambassador. But you could do it.”