The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (53 page)

It was not until after 10:00 p.m. that Figuerola and Blomkvist wrapped sheets around themselves and went to her kitchen to make a cold pasta salad with tuna and bacon from the leftovers in her fridge. They drank water with their dinner.

Figuerola giggled.

“What’s so funny?”

“I’m thinking that Edklinth would be a little bit disturbed if he saw us right now. I don’t believe he intended for me to go to bed with you when he told me to keep a close eye on you.”

“You started it. I had the choice of being handcuffed or coming quietly,” Blomkvist said.

“True, but you weren’t very hard to convince.”

“Maybe you aren’t aware of this—though I doubt that—but you give off the most incredible sexual vibrations. Who on earth do you think can resist that?”

“You’re very kind, but I’m not that sexy. And I don’t have sex that often either.”

“You amaze me.”

“Really, I don’t end up in bed with that many men. I was going out with a guy this spring. But it ended.”

“Why was that?”

“He was sweet, but it turned into a wearisome sort of arm-wrestling contest. I was stronger than he was and he couldn’t bear it. Are you the kind of man who’ll want to arm-wrestle me?”

“You mean, am I someone who has a problem with the fact that you’re fitter and physically stronger than I am? No, I’m not.”

“Thanks for being honest. I’ve noticed that quite a few men get interested, but then they start challenging me and looking for ways to dominate me. Especially if they discover I’m a policewoman.”

“I’m not going to compete with you. I’m better than you are at what I do. And you’re better than I am at what you do.”

“I can live with that attitude.”

“Why did you pick me up?”

“I give in to impulses. And you were one of them!”

“But you’re an officer in Säpo, of all places, and we’re in the middle of an investigation in which I’m involved. . . .”

“You mean it was unprofessional of me. You’re right. I shouldn’t have done it. And I’d have a serious problem if it became known. Edklinth would go through the roof.”

“I won’t tell him.”

“Very chivalrous.”

They were silent for a moment.

“I don’t know what this is going to turn into. You’re a man who gets more than his fair share of action, as I gather. Is that accurate?”

“Yes, unfortunately. And I may not be looking for a steady girlfriend.”

“Fair warning. I’m probably not looking for a steady boyfriend either. Can we keep it on a friendly level?”

“I think that would be best. Monica, I’m not going to tell anybody that we got together. But if we aren’t careful I could end up in one hell of a conflict with your colleagues.”

“I don’t think so. Edklinth is as straight as an arrow. And we share the same objective, you and my people.”

“We’ll see how it goes.”

“You had a thing with Lisbeth Salander too.”

Blomkvist looked at her. “Listen . . . I’m not an open book for everyone to read. My relationship with Lisbeth is none of anyone’s business.”

“She’s Zalachenko’s daughter.”

“Yes, and she has to live with that. But she isn’t Zalachenko. There’s the world of difference.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. I was wondering about your involvement in this story.”

“Lisbeth is my friend. That should be enough of an explanation.”

Susanne Linder from Milton Security was dressed in jeans, a black leather jacket, and running shoes. She arrived in Saltsjöbaden at 9:00 in the evening and Rosin showed her around the house. She had brought a green duffel bag containing her laptop, a spring baton, a Mace canister, handcuffs, and a toothbrush, which she unpacked in Berger’s guest room.

Berger made coffee.

“Thanks for the coffee. You’re probably thinking of me as a guest you have to entertain. The fact is, I’m not a guest at all. I’m a necessary evil that’s suddenly appeared in your life, albeit just for a couple of days. I was in the police for six years and I’ve worked at Milton for four. I’m a trained bodyguard.”

“I see.”

“There’s a threat against you and I’m here to be a gatekeeper so that you can sleep in peace or work or read a book or do whatever you feel like doing. If you need to talk, I’m happy to listen. Otherwise, I brought my own book.”

“Understood.”

“What I mean is that you should go on with your life and not feel as though you need to entertain me. Then I’d just be in the way. The best thing would be for you to think of me as a temporary work colleague.”

“Well, I’m certainly not used to this kind of situation. I’ve had threats before, when I was editor in chief at
Millennium
, but then it had to do with my work. Right now it’s some seriously unpleasant individual—”

“Who has a hang-up about you in particular.”

“Something along those lines.”

“If we have to arrange full bodyguard protection, it’ll cost a lot of money. And for it to be worth the cost, there has to be a very clear and specific threat. This is just an extra job for me. I’ll ask you for 500 kronor a night to sleep here the rest of the week. It’s cheap and far below what I would charge if I took the job for Milton. Is that OK with you?”

“It’s completely OK.”

“If anything happens, I want you to lock yourself in your bedroom and
let me handle the situation. Your job is to press the attack alarm. That’s all. I don’t want you underfoot if there’s any trouble.”

Berger went to bed at 11:00. She heard the click of the lock as she closed her bedroom door. Deep in thought, she undressed and climbed into bed.

She had been told not to feel obliged to entertain her “guest,” but she had spent two hours with Linder at the kitchen table. She discovered that they got along famously. They had discussed the psychology that causes certain men to stalk women. Linder told her that she did not hold with psychological mumbo-jumbo. She thought the most important thing was simply to stop the bastards, and she enjoyed her job at Milton Security a great deal, since her assignments were largely to act as a counter-force to raging lunatics.

“So why did you resign from the police force?” Berger said.

“A better question would be why did I become a police officer in the first place.”

“Why
did
you become a police officer?”

“Because when I was seventeen a close friend of mine was mugged and raped in a car by three utter bastards. I became a police officer because I thought, rather idealistically, that the police existed to prevent crimes like that.”

“Well?”

“I couldn’t prevent shit. As a policewoman I invariably arrived on the scene
after
a crime had been committed. I couldn’t cope with the arrogant lingo on the squad. And I soon found out that some crimes are never even investigated. You’re a typical example. Did you try to call the police about what happened?”

“Yes.”

“And did they bother to come out here?”

“Not really. I was told to file a report at the local station.”

“So now you know. I work for Armansky, and I come into the picture
before
a crime is committed.”

“Mostly concerning women who are threatened?”

“I work with all kinds of things. Security assessments, bodyguard protection, surveillance, and so on. But the work often concerns people who have been threatened. I get on considerably better at Milton than on the force, although there’s a drawback.”

“What’s that?”

“We are only there for clients who can pay.”

As she lay in bed Berger thought about what Linder had said. Not everyone can afford security. She herself had accepted Rosin’s proposal for several new doors, engineers, backup alarm systems, and everything else without blinking. The cost of all that work would be almost 50,000 kronor. But she could afford it.

She pondered for a moment her suspicion that the person threatening her had something to do with
SMP
. Whoever it was had known that she had hurt her foot. She thought of Holm. She did not like him, which added to her mistrust of him, but the news that she had been injured had spread fast from the second she appeared in the newsroom on crutches.

And she had the Borgsjö problem.

She suddenly sat up in bed and frowned, looking around the bedroom. She wondered where she had put Cortez’s file on Borgsjö and Vitavara Inc.

She got up, put on her bathrobe, and leaned on a crutch. She went to her study and turned on the light. No, she had not been in her study since . . . since she had read through the file in the bath the night before. She had put it on the windowsill.

She looked in the bathroom. It was not on the windowsill.

She stood there for a while, worrying.

She had no memory of seeing the folder that morning. She had not moved it anywhere else.

She turned ice-cold and spent the next five minutes searching the bathroom and going through the stacks of papers and newspapers in the kitchen and bedroom. In the end she had to admit that the folder was gone.

Between the time when she had stepped on the shard of glass and Rosin’s arrival that morning, somebody had gone into her bathroom and taken
Millennium
’s material about Vitavara Inc.

Then it occurred to her that she had other secrets in the house. She limped back to the bedroom and opened the bottom drawer of the chest by her bed. Her heart sank like a stone. Everyone has secrets. She kept hers in the chest of drawers in her bedroom. Berger did not regularly write a diary, but there were periods when she had. There were also old love letters which she had kept from her teenage years.

There was an envelope with photographs that had been cool at the time, but . . . When Berger was twenty-five she had been involved in Club Xtreme, which arranged private dating parties for people who were into leather. There were photographs from various parties, and if she had been sober then, she would have recognized that she looked completely demented.

And—most disastrous of all—there was a video taken on vacation in the early nineties when she and Greger had been guests of the glass artist
Torkel Bollinger at his villa on the Costa del Sol. During the vacation Berger had discovered that her husband had a definite bisexual tendency, and they had both ended up in bed with Torkel. It had been a pretty wonderful vacation. Video cameras were still a relatively new phenomenon. The movie they had playfully made was definitely not for general release.

The drawer was empty.

How could I have been so fucking stupid?

On the bottom of the drawer someone had spray-painted the familiar five-letter word.

Salander finished her autobiography at 4:00 on Friday morning and sent a copy to Blomkvist via the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]. Then she lay still in bed and stared at the ceiling.

She knew that on Walpurgis Night she had had her twenty-seventh birthday, but she had not even reflected on the fact at the time. She was imprisoned. She had experienced the same thing at St. Stefan’s. If things did not go right for her, there was a risk that she would spend many more birthdays in some form of confinement.

She was not going to accept a situation like that.

The last time she had been locked up she was barely into her teens. She was grown up now, and had more knowledge and skills. She wondered how long it would take for her to escape and settle down safely in some other country to create a new identity and a new life for herself.

She got up from the bed and went to the bathroom, where she looked in the mirror. She was no longer limping. She ran her fingers over her hip where the wound had healed to a scar. She twisted her arms and stretched her left shoulder back and forth. It was tight, but she was more or less healed. She tapped herself on the head. She supposed that her brain had not been too greatly damaged after being perforated by a bullet with a full-metal jacket.

She had been extraordinarily lucky.

Until she had access to a computer, she had spent her time trying to work out how to escape from this locked room at Sahlgrenska.

Then Dr. Jonasson and Blomkvist had upset her plans by smuggling in her Palm. She had read Blomkvist’s articles and brooded over what he had
to say. She had done a risk assessment and pondered his plan, weighing her chances. She had decided that for once she was going to do as he advised. She would test the system. Blomkvist had convinced her that she had nothing to lose, and he was offering her a chance to escape in a very different way. If the plan failed, she would simply have to plot her escape from St. Stefan’s or whichever other nuthouse they put her in.

What actually convinced her to decide to play the game Blomkvist’s way was her desire for revenge.

She forgave nothing.

Zalachenko, Björck, and Bjurman were dead.

Teleborian, on the other hand, was alive.

So too was her brother, the so-called Ronald Niedermann, even though in reality he was not her problem. Certainly, he had helped in the attempt to murder and bury her, but he seemed peripheral.
If I run into him sometime, we’ll see, but until such time, he’s the police’s problem
.

Yet Blomkvist was right: behind the conspiracy there had to be others not known to her who had contributed to the shaping of her life. She had to put names and social security numbers to these people.

So she had decided to go along with Blomkvist’s plan. That was why she had written the plain, unvarnished truth about her life in a cracklingly terse autobiography of forty pages. She had been quite precise. Everything she had written was true. She had accepted Blomkvist’s reasoning that she had already been so savaged in the Swedish media by such grotesque libels that a little sheer nonsense could not possibly further damage her reputation.

The autobiography was a fiction in the sense that she had not, of course, told the
whole
truth. She had no intention of doing that.

She went back to bed and pulled the covers over her.

She felt a niggling irritation that she could not identify. She reached for a notebook, given to her by Giannini and hardly used. She turned to the first page, where she had written: