The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

by David Lagercrantz

  “No way. You”—he caught his breath—“assaulted me. You’re in serious trouble.”

  “You’re the one in trouble,” she said. “You don’t lift a finger to stop the bullying and abuse in here. Do you have any idea what a disgrace that is? The pride of the prison service has ended up in the hands of a little Mussolini!”

  “But—”

  “Shut it. I’m going to help you fix this. But first you’re going to take me to a computer with an Internet connection.”

  “That is not happening,” he said in a voice that tried to sound tough. “There are cameras all over this corridor. You’re screwed.”

  “Then we’re both screwed and that’s just fine by me,” she said.

  At that moment, Olsen remembered Mikael Blomkvist. During the short time that Salander had been a prisoner, the famous journalist had already visited her two or three times. The last thing Olsen wanted was Blomkvist digging around in his dirty linen. What should he do? He was in far too much pain for rational thought. Instead he held his shoulder and stomach and said, without really knowing what he meant by it:

  “I can’t guarantee anything.”

  “Neither can I, so we’re square. Let’s get going.”

  “What if we run into another staff member in the admin section?” he said.

  “You’ll think of something. The I.Q. test was such an inspired idea, after all.”

  He struggled to his feet and lurched to one side. The bulb in the ceiling seemed to be spinning above him. He felt sick. “One minute, I have to…”

  She helped him straighten up and smoothed his hair, as if to tidy his appearance. Then she hit him again, scaring him half to death. But this time there was no pain. She had put his shoulder back in place.

  “Come on,” she said.

  He thought about pressing the alarm and bawling for help. He considered hitting her with his truncheon and using the pepper spray. But instead he walked down the corridor with Salander as if nothing had happened. As he opened the sally port gates, he prayed they wouldn’t meet anybody. But of course they bumped into his colleague Harriet Lindfors, who was so slippery he could not know whether she sided with Benito or with the authorities. He had the feeling she went with whichever was likely to give her the best opportunity at any given moment.

  “Hi,” Olsen managed.

  Harriet had her hair in a ponytail and her expression was severe. The days when he had found her attractive seemed far off.

  “Where are you going?” she said. He may have been her boss, Olsen realized, but there was no way he could challenge Harriet’s questioning look. He could only mumble:

  “We’re going to…We thought we’d…”

  Using the I.Q. test as an excuse flashed through his mind, but he knew it would not work.

  “…ring Salander’s lawyer,” he said.

  Olsen knew this was not very convincing either, and he probably also looked pale and bleary-eyed. All he wanted was to sink to the ground and shout for help, but he pulled himself together and added with unexpected authority:

  “He’s flying to Jakarta tomorrow morning.”

  He had no idea where Jakarta came from, but it was sufficiently specific and exotic to sound credible.

  “OK, I see,” Harriet said in a tone more appropriate to her status, and she left them. As soon as they could be sure she was out of sight, they continued on their way.

  Olsen’s office was sacred ground. The door was always closed and it was off-limits to inmates, who were certainly not allowed to make calls from there. But that was where they were heading. Maybe the guys in the control centre had already seen them crossing to the staff side after the doors closed. Any minute now someone would be along to see what was going on. It would not look good, but it might be for the best. He fingered his belt and thought about sounding the alarm. But he was too ashamed and, though he would never admit it, fascinated. Whatever would she think of next?

  He unlocked the door and let her into the office, and for the first time it struck him that it was a pretty sad sight. How pathetic to have big photos of his mother pinned to the bulletin board, larger even than the photographs of Vilda. He should have taken them down a long time ago. For that matter he should have resigned and never had anything more to do with criminals. But there he stood. He closed the door as Salander fixed him with a dark, resolute look.

  “I have a problem,” she said.

  “And what’s that?”

  “You.”

  “Why am I the problem?”

  “If I send you out, you’ll call for help. But if you stay here, you’ll see what I’m doing.”

  “Why, what are you going to do? Something illegal?”

  “Probably,” she said.

  And then he must have done something wrong again. Either that, or she was completely insane. She punched him in the solar plexus for the third or fourth time and once again he collapsed, gulping for breath, bracing for another blow. But instead Salander bent down and with a swift movement undid his belt and put it on the desk. He drew himself up, in spite of the pain, and glared at her.

  It felt as if they might fly at each other. But she disarmed him yet again by glancing over at his bulletin board.

  “Is that your mother there in the picture? You saved her, right?”

  He did not answer. He was still considering launching himself at her.

  “Is that your mum?” she asked again. He nodded.

  “Is she dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she’s important to you, right? In that case you’ll understand. I have to find some information, and you’re going to let me do it.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because you’ve already let things go too far in here. In return, I’ll help you bring down Benito.”

  “That woman is ruthless.”

  “So am I,” she said.

  Salander had a point. He was in over his head. He had allowed her access and lied to Harriet. He did not have much to lose, so when she asked him for his computer log-in, he simply gave it to her.

  Her hands moved at bewildering speed over the keyboard, and he was spellbound by them. For what felt like an age, she seemed to be searching aimlessly, skipping through various home pages in Uppsala, those of the university hospital and the university itself. It was only when she came across a site for an antiquated-looking place—the Institute for Medical Genetics—that she paused and keyed in a few commands. Within seconds the screen went totally black. She was motionless, her breathing heavy and her fingers hovering over the keyboard, like a pianist preparing for a difficult piece.

  Then she hammered something out with astonishing speed, rows of white numbers and letters on the black screen. Soon after, the computer began to write by itself, spewing a flood of symbols, incomprehensible programme codes and commands. He could understand only the occasional English word—Connecting database, Search, Query and Response—and then Bypassing security, which was more than a little alarming. She waited, drumming her fingers on the table impatiently. “Shit!” A window had popped up that read ACCESS DENIED. She tried several more times until at last a ripple went across the screen, disappearing inwards, and then a flash of colour: ACCESS GRANTED. Soon things began to happen which Olsen had not imagined possible. It was as if Salander was drawn through a wormhole into cyber worlds belonging to another time, a time long before the Internet.

  She flicked past old, scanned documents and lists of names recorded with a typewriter or ballpoint pen. These were followed by columns of numbers and notes, which looked like test results. Some of the documents were stamped CONFIDENTIAL. He saw her own name among many others, and a whole series of reports. It was as if she had turned the computer into a snake which moved soundlessly through secret archives and sealed vaults. She kept going for hours, on and on.

  He still had no idea what she was up to, though he could tell from her body language and her muttering that she did not quite reach her goal. After four and a h
alf hours she gave up. He heaved a sigh of relief. He needed to pee. He needed to get home and see that Vilda was alright and go to sleep and forget about the world. But Salander told him to sit still and shut up. She had one more thing to do. She rebooted and typed in some new commands. He realized to his horror that she was trying to hack into the prison’s computer system.

  “Don’t do it,” he said.

  “You don’t like the prison governor, do you?”

  “What?”

  “Me neither,” she said. And then she did something he did not want to see.

  She began to read Rikard Fager’s e-mails and files. And he just let her. Not only because he hated the man who ran Flodberga, or because everything had already gone too far. It was the way she used the computer. It seemed like an extension of her body, an instrument she played like a virtuoso, and this made him trust her. Maybe it was irrational; he had no idea. But he let her keep going, launching new attacks.

  The monitor went black again, and once more those words: ACCESS GRANTED. What the hell? There on the screen he saw the corridor in the unit right outside. It lay still and dark. She played the same sequence of film several times, as if expanding it. For a long while Olsen sat with his hands in his lap and his eyes closed, hoping that this agony would soon be over.

  At 1:52 a.m. Salander stood up abruptly and muttered, “Thank you.” Without asking what she had done, he escorted her past the sally port gates back to her cell and wished her good night. Then he drove home and hardly slept—except for a short while just before dawn, when he dreamed about Benito and her daggers.

  CHAPTER 4

  June 17–18

  Fridays were Lisbeth days.

  Once a week on a Friday afternoon Blomkvist went to visit Salander in jail. He looked forward to it, especially now that he had come to terms with the situation and stopped being so angry. It had taken a while.

  The prosecution and the verdict against her had made him furious. He ranted and raved on television and in the newspapers. But when eventually he realized that Salander herself did not care, he came to see her point of view. So long as she could keep on with her quantum physics and her workouts, it made no difference whether she was in prison or anywhere else. Perhaps she even saw her time inside as an experience, an opportunity. She was funny that way. She took life as it came, and often when he worried about her she just smiled at him, even when she was transferred to Flodberga.

  Blomkvist did not like Flodberga. Nobody did. It was the only maximum security women’s prison in Sweden, and Salander had ended up there because Ingemar Eneroth, the head of the national prison service, had insisted it was the safest place for her. Both Säpo and D.G.S.E., the French intelligence service, had picked up threats against her, said to come from her sister Camilla’s criminal network in Russia.

  It could well be true. It could also be bullshit. But since Salander had no objection to being transferred, that’s what happened, and in any case there was not much left of her sentence. Maybe it was fine after all. Salander had seemed in unusually good spirits the previous Friday. And prison meals could be classified as health food compared to the junk she ordinarily stuffed herself with.

  Blomkvist was on the train to Örebro, going through the July issue of Millennium on his laptop. It was due to go to the printers at the end of the day. The rain was pouring down outside. According to the forecasts, this would be the hottest summer in years. But the rain had been relentless, falling day after day, and Blomkvist longed to escape to his house on Sandhamn to find some peace. He had been working hard. Millennium’s finances were in good shape. After his revelations about senior figures within the U.S. National Security Agency colluding with organized crime syndicates in Russia to steal corporate secrets all over the world, the magazine’s star had risen again. But their success had also brought worries. Blomkvist and the editorial management were under pressure to bring the magazine more into the digital landscape. It was a positive development, inevitable in the new media climate, but incredibly time-consuming. Discussions about social media strategy interfered with his concentration. He had begun to dig into several good stories, but had not gotten to the bottom of any of them.

  It didn’t help that the person who had handed him the scoop about the N.S.A.—Salander—was behind bars. He was in her debt.

  He looked out the train window, badly wanting to be left in peace. Wishful thinking. The elderly lady sitting next to him, who had been asking incessant questions, now wanted to know where he was going. He tried to be evasive. She meant well, like most people who bothered him these days, but he was relieved when he had to cut their conversation short to get off at Örebro. He ran through the rain to catch his connecting bus. It was ridiculous to have to travel for forty minutes in an old Scania bus without air-conditioning, given that the prison was situated so close to the railway line, but there was no nearby train station. It was 5:40 p.m. by the time he began to make out the dull-grey concrete wall of the prison. At twenty-three feet high, ribbed and curved, it looked like a gigantic wave frozen in the middle of a terrifying assault on the open plain. The pine forest was a mere line on the distant horizon and there was not another human dwelling in sight. The prison entrance gate was so close to the railway-crossing barriers that there was only room for one car at a time to pass in front of it.

  Blomkvist stepped off the bus and was let through the steel gates. He made his way to the guard post and put his phone and keys in a grey locker. As he went through the security check it felt as though they were deliberately giving him a hard time, as so often happened. A man in his thirties with a tattoo and a crew cut even grabbed his crotch. Then a drug-sniffer dog was led in, a black Labrador. Did they really imagine he would try to smuggle drugs into the prison?

  He chose to ignore it all and set off down the endless corridors with a taller and slightly more pleasant prison officer. The sally port gates were opened automatically by staff in the monitoring centre, who were following their progress via C.C.T.V. cameras in the ceiling. It was a while before they arrived at the visitors’ section, and he was kept waiting for a long time.

  So it was hard to say exactly when he noticed something was amiss.

  It was probably when Olsen appeared. Olsen was sweating profusely and seemed uneasy. He uttered a few polite remarks as he ushered Blomkvist into the visitors’ room at the end of the corridor. Salander was wearing her worn and washed-out prison uniform, which was always ridiculously loose on her. Normally she would stand up when he came in. Now she just sat there, tense and apprehensive. With her head tilted slightly to one side, she was staring past him. She was uncharacteristically still, and answered his questions in monosyllables, never once meeting his eye. In the end he had to ask her if something had happened.

  “That depends on how you look at it,” she said. It was a start, at least.

  “Do you want to tell me more?”

  She did not—“not now, and not in here”—and there was silence. The rain was hammering down on the exercise yard and the wall beyond the barred window. Blomkvist gazed blankly around the room.

  “Do I need to worry?” he said.

  “You certainly do,” she said with a grin. It was hardly the joke he had been hoping for. But it did relieve the tension and he smiled a little too and asked if there was anything he could help with. For a while neither spoke, and then she said, “Maybe,” which surprised him. Salander never asked for help unless she badly needed it.

  “Great. I’ll do whatever you want—within reason,” he said.

  “Within reason?”

  She was smirking again.

  “I prefer to avoid criminal activity,” he said. “It would be a shame for both of us to end up in here.”

  “You’d have to settle for a men’s prison, Mikael.”

  “Unless my devastating charm gives me special dispensation to come here. What’s going on?”

  “I have some old lists of names,” she said, “and something isn’t right about them.
For example, there’s this guy called Leo Mannheimer.”

  “Leo Mannheimer.”

  “Right, he’s thirty-six. It’ll take you no time to find him online.”

  “That’s a start. What should I be looking for?”

  Salander glanced around the visitors’ room, as if Blomkvist might find there what he was meant to be looking for. Then she turned and, with an absent look, said:

  “I don’t honestly know.”

  “Am I supposed to believe that?”

  “Broadly, yes.”

  “Broadly?” He felt a stab of irritation. “OK, so you don’t know. But you want him checked out. Has he done anything in particular? Or does he just seem shady?”

  “You probably know the securities firm he works for. But I’d prefer your investigation to be unbiased.”

  “Come on,” he said. “I need more than that. What are those lists you mentioned?”

  “Lists of names.”

  She was being so cryptic and vague that for a moment he imagined she was simply winding him up, and they would soon go back to chatting, as they had the previous Friday. Instead, Salander stood up and called for the guard and said that she wanted to be taken back to her unit.

  “You’ve got to be joking.”

  “I don’t joke,” she said.

  He wanted to curse and shout and tell her how many hours it takes him to travel to Flodberga and back, and that he could easily find better things to do with himself on a Friday evening. But he knew it was pointless. So he stood and hugged her, and with a little fatherly authority told her to take care of herself. “Maybe,” she said, and with any luck she was being ironic. Already she seemed lost in other thoughts.

  He watched as she was led away by Olsen. He did not like the quiet determination in her step. Reluctantly, he let himself be escorted in the other direction, back to the security gates, where he opened the locker and retrieved his mobile and keys. He decided to treat himself to a taxi to Örebro Central Station, and on the train to Stockholm he read a novel by Peter May, a Scottish crime writer. As a sort of protest he put off checking up on Leo Mannheimer.