The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye

by David Lagercrantz

  Dan was rootless for a long time. He travelled around Europe and Asia, playing guitar and reading up on the financial markets. He found he had a burning thirst for knowledge. He felt—or rather believed—that as an outsider he would be able to apply a new kind of meta-perspective to the financial markets, and in the end he decided to resume Leo’s place at Alfred Ögren, not least to find out about the dossier of evidence Rakel Greitz and Ivar Ögren had against his brother. He realized that it would not be easy to deny the allegations. When he instructed one of Stockholm’s best business lawyers, Bengt Wallin, to look into them and was briefed on the extent and type of deals carried out in Leo’s name through Mossack Fonseca in Panama, he was strongly advised to leave it alone.

  —

  As the weeks went by, life resumed its normal course, as it tends to do. Dan and Leo bided their time, and remained in close contact. When Dan left Blomkvist in the lobby of Alfred Ögren that day, the person he called was Leo. Leo was silent for a long while, and then told Dan it was up to him to decide if the time was right to tell their story, adding that it would be hard to find a more suitable outlet than Mikael Blomkvist at Millennium.

  Now Dan had indeed started to talk, though he hadn’t yet said anything about Leo’s new life in Canada. Standing at the window of the studio, he called Toronto once again and was deep in conversation when he was interrupted by a discreet knock at the door. Erika Berger had arrived.

  —

  Earlier that day, feeling horribly nauseous, Greitz had dragged herself back along to Hamngatan, meaning to take a taxi to go home to Karlbergsvägen and collapse in her bed. But halfway there she became angry with herself and went to her office in the west of the city instead. It was unlike her to let illness or adversity get the upper hand. She decided to keep fighting and activated every contact and ally she could think of to find Blomkvist and Daniel Brolin—all except Steinberg, who had broken down after repeated calls from the police. She sent Benjamin off to the Millennium offices on Götgatan and to Blomkvist’s apartment building on Bellmansgatan. But Benjamin only encountered locked doors. In the end she gave up for the day and let him drive her home. She needed to get some rest, and also to destroy the most sensitive of Project 9’s documents, which she kept at home in a safe behind the wardrobe in her bedroom.

  It was 4:30 p.m. and still unbearably hot. She let Benjamin help her out of the car. She really did need him, and not only as a bodyguard. She was groggy after all the stress of the day. Her black turtleneck was damp with sweat. The city swayed before her eyes. She stood straight and looked up at the sky, and for a moment her look was triumphant. She might ultimately be unmasked and humiliated, but she had fought—she was convinced of this—for something greater than herself: for science and for the future. She was determined to go down with dignity. She vowed to remain strong and proud to the end, however ill she might be.

  At the building’s street entrance she asked Benjamin to hand her the orange juice he had bought for her on the way and, even though it was a little undignified, she drank straight from the bottle and felt briefly restored. They took the lift to the sixth floor, where she unlocked the front door and asked Benjamin to go in ahead and switch off the burglar alarm. She was just about to step over the threshold when she froze and looked down towards the floor below. A pale figure was climbing the stairs, a young woman who seemed to have risen from the underworld.

  —

  Salander was more presentable than she had been, even if her face was white and eyes bloodshot, her cheeks scratched from brambles and bushes. She was walking with visible difficulty. But she had gone to the trouble of buying a T-shirt and a pair of jeans from a secondhand shop on Upplandsgatan and had stuffed her bloodstained clothes into a bin. She had also bought a mobile in a Telenor store, and dressings and disinfectant at a pharmacy. Standing on the pavement, she ripped off the duct tape she had found in a holiday home in the woods and used to staunch the flow of blood from her hip, and she replaced it with a new and better bandage.

  For a while she had been lying semi-conscious on the forest floor. As soon as she came to, she sawed through the rope around her wrists on a jagged rock. She made her way to National Highway 77 and got a lift from a woman in an old Rover all the way to Vasastan, where she attracted a good deal of attention.

  According to a witness named Kjell Ove Strömgren, she looked unwell and dangerous when she walked in “through said doorway” at Karlbergsvägen. She didn’t bother to look at herself in the mirror in the entrance hall, as she did not expect it would be edifying. She felt like shit. The dagger had probably not damaged any vital organs, but she had lost a significant amount of blood and was ready to pass out.

  Greitz—or Nordin, as the misleading sign on the door said—was not at home. Salander sat on the landing one level down, and from there she texted Blomkvist. He sent back a lot of sensible advice and other crap. All she wanted to know, she texted back, was what he had found out. Finally, he gave her a summary and she nodded as she read it and closed her eyes. The pain and the dizziness were getting worse, and she only just managed to resist the impulse to stretch out on the floor. For a moment it felt as if she would never be able to pull herself together again, or to do anything at all. But then she thought of Palmgren.

  She remembered how he had come all the way to Flodberga in his wheelchair and she couldn’t help thinking how much he had meant to her all these years. But above all she thought about what Blomkvist had told her of his death, and it was clear that he was right: only Greitz could have killed the old man. She drew strength from that—it was up to her to avenge Palmgren. She knew she had to strike with all her might, however weak she felt, so she pulled back her shoulders and shook her head, and finally, after another ten or fifteen minutes, the rickety lift stopped on the floor above her. The door was pushed open and through the banisters she could make out a large man and a much older woman in a black turtleneck. Oddly enough, Salander recognized her by the way she carried herself. It was as if the mere sight of Greitz’s ramrod spine had taken her back to her childhood.

  But she did not allow herself to dwell on it. She sent a rapid message to Bublanski and Modig and headed up the stairs, not very steadily and apparently not very quietly either. Greitz spun around and looked Salander in the eye, first in surprise and then—once she had recognized her—with fear and loathing. Salander stopped on the stairs, holding the wound in her side.

  “We meet again,” Salander said.

  “You took your time.”

  “And yet it seems like yesterday, don’t you think?”

  Greitz ignored the question and growled:

  “Benjamin! Bring her here!”

  Benjamin nodded. He was a foot and a half taller than Salander and twice as broad, so he didn’t seem to think he would have any trouble. But when he lunged at her, he was carried forward not only by the sheer mass of his body, but also by the downward slope of the steps. Salander stepped neatly to one side, took hold of the man’s left arm and tugged. At that moment Benjamin’s determination proved counterproductive. He went down headfirst on the stone landing, cracking his elbow on the way. Salander saw none of it. She was already hobbling up the stairs, shoving Greitz inside and locking the door behind them. Benjamin was soon hammering on the outside of the door.

  Greitz backed away, clutching her brown leather bag. In a few seconds she had regained the upper hand, but that had nothing to do with the bag or its contents: Salander had expended so much energy on the stairs that her dizziness almost overwhelmed her. She looked around the apartment through half-closed eyes, and although her vision was hardly clear, she knew she had never seen anything like it. Not only was the place devoid of all colour—everything was either black or white—it was also dazzlingly clean and clinical, as if an android lived there rather than a human being. There could not have been a speck of dust in the entire apartment. Salander steadied herself against a black chest of drawers. Just as she was about to pass out, she saw from the corn
er of her eye Greitz advancing towards her, holding something in her hand. A syringe.

  “I’ve just been hearing how you like to stick needles into people,” Salander said. Greitz attacked, but to no avail. Salander kicked the syringe out of her hand, and it fell onto the shiny white floor and rolled away. Even though her head was spinning, she managed to stay on her feet and for a few seconds she focused only on Greitz. She was surprised at how calm the woman looked.

  “Go ahead and kill me. I’ll die with pride,” Greitz said.

  “With pride, did you say?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Not going to happen.”

  —

  Salander looked sick and spoke in a flat, exhausted voice, but still, Greitz knew that this was the end of the road. She looked towards the window on her left, out towards Karlbergsvägen, and hesitated for a second or two. Then it became clear that she had no alternative. Anything would be better than ending up in Salander’s clutches. So she made a dash for the balcony door and felt the terrifying pull of the urge to jump—but Salander caught her before she could climb over the railing. It wasn’t exactly what either of them had expected. Rakel Greitz was being saved by the person she had dreaded more than anyone else. Salander held her firmly and led her back into her clinically clean apartment.

  “You will die, Rakel. Don’t you worry about that,” she whispered in her ear.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ve got cancer.”

  “The cancer’s nothing.” Salander’s tone was chilling.

  “What do you mean?”

  Salander stared at the ground.

  “Holger meant a lot to me,” she said, and she gripped Greitz’s hand so hard it felt to Greitz as if her blood had frozen. “What I’m saying is that the cancer will seem like nothing, Rakel. You’re going to die of shame too, and believe me, that’ll be the worst part. I’ll make sure so much dirt is unearthed about you that no-one will remember you for anything other than all the evil you have unleashed. You’ll be buried in your own excrement.”

  She said this with such conviction that Greitz believed it. Then Salander calmly opened the door to let in a group of policemen, who had handcuffed Benjamin to a banister.

  “Good afternoon, Fru Greitz. You and I have a lot to talk about. We’ve just arrested your colleague, Professor Steinberg,” said a dark-haired man with a half-smile, who introduced himself as Chief Inspector Bublanski.

  It did not take his men long to find the safe behind her wardrobe. The last she saw of Salander was her back as paramedics led her away. Salander didn’t turn around once. It was as if Greitz no longer existed for her.

  CHAPTER 24

  June 30

  It was another hot summer’s day. There had not been a drop of rain for two weeks. Blomkvist was in the kitchen area at Millennium’s editorial offices on Götgatan. He had just finished writing his long piece on the Registry and Project 9. He stretched his back and drank some water and looked over towards the bright-blue sofa on the other side of the room.

  Erika Berger lay stretched out in her high-heeled shoes, reading his article. He was not exactly nervous. He knew for sure it made for harrowing reading. They had a scoop which would be tremendous for the magazine. Yet he still did not know how Berger would react—not because of the one or two sections which gave rise to ethical questions, but because of their argument.

  He had told her that he would not be spending the Midsummer weekend out in the archipelago or celebrating in any way. Instead he would be concentrating on his story. He needed to go through the documents he had received from Bublanski, and he needed to interview Hilda von Kanterborg again, as well as Dan Brody and Leo Mannheimer, who had come to Stockholm from Toronto in secret with his fiancée.

  And Blomkvist had been working pretty much around the clock, not just on the report about the Registry but also on the Faria Kazi story. It was not he who had actually written it—Sofie Melker had. But he was involved from start to finish and had discussed the legal process with his sister while she worked to get Faria released and protected with a new identity.

  He was regularly in touch with Inspector Modig, who was leading the newly reopened inquiry into what was now accepted as the murder of Jamal Chowdhury, for which Bashir, Razan and Khalil Kazi and two others were in custody and awaiting trial. Benito Andersson had been taken to Hammerfors Prison in Härnösand, and she too was awaiting fresh charges. Plus Blomkvist often got caught up in long conversations with Bublanski, and he was spending more time on the purely stylistic side of the story too.

  But even he had gotten to the point where he could do no more. He needed a break. He was almost seeing double, and it was unbearably hot at his desk on Bellmansgatan. One afternoon he felt a pang of longing and called Malin Frode.

  “Would you come over?” he said. “Pretty please.”

  Malin agreed to get a babysitter if Blomkvist promised to buy strawberries and Champagne and turn back his sheets, and not have his mind on other things like Kalle Fucking Blomkvist usually did. He told her the conditions sounded reasonable enough. And so they were tumbling about in bed, happy and drunk and oblivious to the rest of the world, when Berger dropped by unannounced with an expensive bottle of red wine.

  Berger had never considered Blomkvist a model of good behaviour, and she herself was married and not overly scrupulous about dalliances. Yet it had all gotten out of hand. If he had had the time and inclination, he could have worked out why. One reason was Malin’s fiery temperament, and another was the fact that Berger was upset and embarrassed. They had all been embarrassed. The women began to argue with each other, and then they argued with him too, until Berger marched off in a fury, slamming the door behind her. Since then, conversations at the magazine between her and Blomkvist had been strained and confined to work issues.

  But now Berger was lying there reading, and Blomkvist was thinking about Salander. She had been discharged from the hospital and had flown in haste to Gibraltar—she said she had business to attend to there. But they had kept in touch every day about Faria Kazi and about the investigation into the Registry.

  So far, the public knew nothing about the background to the story, and the names of the presumed suspects had not yet been published in any major media. Berger had therefore been insistent that they swiftly put out a special issue of the magazine so that no-one could scoop them. Perhaps that was why she was so upset when she found Blomkvist lying in bed drinking Champagne, though he could not have been more serious about getting the report ready.

  Now he kept sneaking looks at Berger, who eventually took off her reading glasses and got up and joined him in the kitchen. She was wearing jeans and a blue blouse, open at the neck. She sat next to him at the table. He couldn’t guess whether she would begin with praise or with criticism.

  “I don’t understand it.”

  “That’s unfortunate,” he said. “I was hoping I had shed at least some light on the story.”

  “Why on earth did they keep it a secret for so long?”

  “Leo and Dan? As I say in the article, there was evidence that Leo had been involved in illegal transactions through various dummy companies. Although it’s clear now that Ivar Ögren and Rakel Greitz had set him up, Leo and Dan couldn’t find any way of getting at them. Besides, and I hope this is clear from what I’ve written, they were beginning to enjoy their new roles. Neither of them was short of money—large sums were being transferred all the time—and I think both of them were experiencing a new kind of freedom, a bit like the freedom that any actor enjoys. They could start afresh and do something different. I can understand the appeal.”

  “And then they fell in love.”

  “With Julia and Marie.”

  “The pictures are wonderful.”

  “That’s something at least.”

  “It’s good that we’ve got decent photographers,” she said. “But you do realize that Ivar Ögren’s going to sue the crap out of us?”

  “I think we’re well arme
d for that, Erika.”

  “Plus, I’m worried about defaming the dead—because of that fatal incident at the elk hunt.”

  “I’m sure I’m on firm ground there too. All I’m actually saying is that the circumstances surrounding the shooting are unclear.”

  “I’m not sure it’s good enough. Just that is already pretty damaging.”

  “OK, I’ll take another look. Is there anything that doesn’t worry you, or that you even…dare I say it, do understand?”

  “You’re a bastard.”

  “Maybe a bit. Especially after dark.”

  “Are you planning to devote yourself to one woman only from now on, or are you considering spending time with others too?”

  “In a pinch I could imagine drinking Champagne with you, if worst came to worst.”

  “You won’t have any choice.”

  “Will you force me?”

  “If I have to, yes, because this article—the part we’re not going to be sued for, that is—it’s…”

  She held back.

  “Broadly acceptable?” he said.

  “You could say that,” she replied, and smiled. “Congratulations.” She opened her arms to embrace him.

  —

  But then something else grabbed their attention, and later it would prove difficult to recall the exact sequence of events. Sofie Melker was probably the first to react. She was at her computer in the editorial offices and yelled out something incomprehensible, but it was clear that she was either shocked or surprised. Soon afterwards—or at the same time—Berger and Blomkvist received news flashes on their mobiles. Neither of them was especially worried. It was not a terrorist attack or a threat of war. It was only a stock market crash. But gradually they were consumed by the events as they unfolded. Step-by-step they entered into the state of heightened awareness which one finds in every press room when major, world-shattering news events occur. They became wholly concentrated and shouted out what they saw on their computers. There were new developments every minute.