The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (85 page)

She turned on her heel, grabbed the iron rod, and went to the outer room to find her shoulder bag. As she bent to retrieve it she caught sight of the knife. She still had her gloves on, and she picked up the weapon.

She hesitated a moment and then placed it in full view in the centre aisle between the stacks of packing crates. With the iron rod she spent three minutes prising loose the padlock so that she could get outside.

•    •    •

She sat in her car and thought for a long time. Finally she flipped open her mobile. It took her two minutes to locate the number for Svavelsjö MC’s clubhouse.

“Yeah?”

“Nieminen,” she said.

“Wait.”

She waited for three minutes before Sonny Nieminen came to the phone.

“Who’s this?”

“None of your fucking business,” Salander said in such a low voice that he could hardly make out the words. He could not even tell whether it was a man or a woman.

“All right, so what do you want?”

“You want a tip about Niedermann?”

“Do I?”

“Don’t give me shit. Want to know where he is or not?”

“I’m listening.”

Salander gave him directions to the brickworks outside Norrtälje. She said that he would be there long enough for Nieminen to find him if he hurried.

She closed her mobile, started the car, and drove up to the gas station across the road. She parked so that she had a clear view of the brickworks.

She had to wait for more than two hours. It was just before 1:30 in the afternoon when she saw a van drive slowly past on the road below her. It stopped at the turning off the main road, stood there for five minutes, and then drove down to the brickworks. On this December day, twilight was setting in.

She opened the glove box and took out a pair of Minolta 16 × 50 binoculars and watched as the van parked. She identified Nieminen and Waltari with three men she did not recognize.
New blood. They had to rebuild their operation
.

When Nieminen and his pals had found the open door at the end of the building, she opened her mobile again. She composed a message and sent it to the police station in Norrtälje.

She could not see any movement from the factory.

She bided her time.

As she waited she removed the SIM card from her phone and cut it up with some nail scissors. She rolled down the window and tossed out the pieces. Then she took a new SIM card from her wallet and inserted it in her phone. She was using a Comviq cash card, which was virtually impossible to track. She called Comviq and credited 500 kronor to the new card.

Eleven minutes after her message was sent, two police vans with their sirens off but with blue lights flashing drove at high speed up to the factory from the direction of Norrtälje. They parked in the yard next to Nieminen’s van. A minute later two squad cars arrived. The officers conferred and then moved together towards the brickworks. Salander raised her binoculars. She saw one of the policemen radio through the registration number of Nieminen’s van. The officers stood around waiting. Salander watched as another team approached at high speed two minutes later.

Finally it was all over.

The story that had begun on the day she was born had ended at the brickworks.

She was free.

When the officers took out assault rifles from their vehicles, put on Kevlar vests, and started to fan out around the factory site, Salander went inside the shop and bought a coffee and a sandwich wrapped in cellophane. She ate standing at a counter in the café.

It was dark by the time she got back to her car. Just as she opened the door, she heard two distant reports from what she assumed were handguns on the other side of the road. She saw several black figures, presumably policemen, pressed against the wall near the entrance at one end of the building. She heard sirens as another squad car approached from the direction of Uppsala. A few cars had stopped at the side of the road below her to watch the drama.

She started the Honda, turned onto the E18, and drove home.

It was 7:00 that evening when Salander, to her great annoyance, heard the doorbell ring. She was in the bath and the water was still steaming. There was really only one person who could be at her front door.

At first she thought she would ignore it, but at the third ring she sighed, got out of the bath, and wrapped a towel around her. Pouting, she trailed water down the hall floor. She opened the door a crack.

“Hello,” Blomkvist said.

She did not answer.

“Did you hear the evening news?”

She shook her head.

“I thought you might like to know that Ronald Niedermann is dead. He was murdered today in Norrtälje by a gang from Svavelsjö MC.”

“Really?” Salander said.

“I talked to the duty officer in Norrtälje. It seems to have been some sort of internal dispute. Apparently Niedermann had been tortured and slit open with a knife. They found a bag at the factory with several hundred thousand kronor.”

“Jesus.”

“The Svavelsjö mob was arrested, but they put up quite a fight. There was a shoot-out and the police had to send for a backup team from Stockholm. The bikers surrendered at around 6:00.”

“Is that so?”

“Your old friend Sonny Nieminen bit the dust. He went completely nuts and tried to shoot his way out.”

“That’s nice.”

Blomkvist stood there in silence. They looked at each other through the crack in the door.

“Am I interrupting something?” he said.

She shrugged. “I was in the bath.”

“I can see that. Do you want some company?”

She gave him an acid look.

“I didn’t mean in the bath. I’ve brought some bagels,” he said, holding up a bag. “And some espresso. Since you own a Jura Impressa X7, you should at least learn how to use it.”

She raised her eyebrows. She did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved.

“Just company?”

“Just company,” he confirmed. “I’m visiting a good friend. If I’m welcome, that is.”

She hesitated. For two years she had kept as far away from Mikael Blomkvist as she could. And yet he kept sticking to her life like gum on the sole of her shoe, either on the Net or in real life. On the Net it was OK. There he was no more than electrons and words. In real life, standing on her doorstep, he was still fucking attractive. And he knew her secrets just as she knew all of his.

She looked at him for a moment and realized that she now had no feelings for him. At least not those kinds of feelings.

He had in fact been a good friend to her over the past year.

She trusted him. Maybe. It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding.

Then she made up her mind. It was absurd to pretend that he did not exist. It no longer hurt her to see him.

She opened the door wide and let him into her life again.

Olof Palme
was the leader of the Social Democratic Party and prime minister of Sweden at the time of his assassination on February 28, 1986. He was an outspoken politician, popular with the left and detested by the right. Two years after his death a petty criminal and drug addict was convicted of his murder but was later acquitted on appeal. Although a number of alternative theories as to who carried out the murder have since been proposed, to this day the crime remains unsolved.

Prompted by Olof Palme’s assassination, Prime Minister
Ingvar Carlsson
called an investigation into the procedures of the Swedish Security Police (Säpo) in the fall of 1987. Carl Lidbom, then Swedish ambassador to France, was given the task of leading the investigation. One of his old acquaintances, the publisher
Ebbe Carlsson
, firmly believed that the Kurdish organization PKK was involved in the murder and was given resources to start a private investigation. The Ebbe Carlsson affair exploded as a major political scandal in 1988, when it was revealed that the publisher had been secretly supported by the then minister of justice, Anna-Greta Leijon. She was subsequently forced to resign.

Informationsbyrån (IB)
was a secret intelligence agency without official status within the Swedish armed forces. Its main purpose was to gather information about communists and other individuals who were perceived to be a threat to the nation. It was thought that these findings were passed on to key politicians at cabinet level, most likely the defence minister at the time, Sven Andersson, and Prime Minister Olof Palme. The exposure of the agency’s operations by journalists Jan Guillou and Peter Bratt in the magazine
Folket i Bild/Kulturfront
in 1973 became known as
the IB affair
.

Carl Bildt
was prime minister of Sweden between 1991 and 1994 and leader of the liberal conservative Moderate Party from 1986 to 1999.

Anna Lindh
was a Swedish Social Democratic politician who served as foreign minister from 1998 until her assassination in 2003. She was considered by many as one of the leading candidates to succeed Göran Persson as leader of the Social Democrats and prime minister of Sweden. In the final weeks of her life she was intensely involved in the pro-euro campaign preceding the Swedish referendum on the euro.

Colonel Stig Wennerström
of the Swedish air force was convicted of treason in 1964. During the fifties he was suspected of leaking air defence plans to the Soviets, and in 1963 he was informed upon by his maid, who had been recruited by Säpo. He was initially sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was commuted to twenty years in 1973, of which he served only ten. He died in 2006. He is not to be confused with Hans-Erik Wennerström, the crooked financier who appears in
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
and
The Girl Who Played with Fire
.

In the late eighties and early nineties there was an immigration crisis in Sweden. The number of asylum seekers increased, and the resulting unemployment and backlash from local government prompted the city of Sjöbo to hold a referendum in 1998, where the population voted against accepting immigrants. The subsequent political debate, called
the Sjöbo debate
, led to a combined immigration and integration system in the Aliens Act of 1989.

Stieg Larsson was the editor in chief of the antiracist magazine
Expo
, and for twenty years the graphics editor at a Swedish news agency. He was a leading expert on anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and Nazi organizations. He died in 2004, shortly after delivering the manuscripts for
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire
, and
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
.