Blomkvist smiled at her. "Ouch," he said. "The Security Police are pulling on my leash." He stubbed out his cigarette.
"Mikael, this is not a joke."
Berger drove to the office on Saturday morning still feeling queasy. She had thought she was beginning to come to grips with the actual process of producing a newspaper and had planned to reward herself with a weekend off--the first since she started at SMP--but the discovery that her most personal and intimate possessions had been stolen, and the Borgsjo report too, made it impossible for her to relax.
During a sleepless night spent mostly in the kitchen with Linder, Berger had expected the "Poison Pen" to strike, disseminating pictures of her that would be deplorably damaging. What an excellent tool the Internet was for freaks. Good grief . . . a video of me fucking my husband and another man--I'm going to end up on half the websites in the world.
Panic and terror had dogged her through the night.
It took all of Linder's powers of persuasion to send her to bed.
At 8:00 she got up and drove to SMP. She could not stay away. If a storm was brewing, then she wanted to face it first, before anyone else got wind of it.
But in the half-staffed Saturday newsroom everything was normal. People greeted her as she limped past the central desk. Holm was off today. Fredriksson was the acting news editor.
"Morning. I thought you were taking today off," he said.
"Me too. But I wasn't feeling well yesterday and there are things I have to do. Anything happening?"
"No, it's pretty slow today. The hottest thing we've got is that the timber industry in Dalarna is reporting a boom, and there was a robbery in Norrkoping in which one person was injured."
"Right. I'll be in the cage for a while."
She sat down, leaned her crutches against the bookshelves, and logged on. First she checked her email. She had several messages, but nothing from Poison Pen. She frowned. It had been two days now since the break-in, and he had not yet acted on what had to be a treasure trove of opportunities. Why not? Maybe he's going to change tactics. Blackmail? Maybe he just wants to keep me guessing.
She had nothing specific to work on, so she clicked on the strategy document she was writing for SMP. She stared at the screen for fifteen minutes without seeing the words.
She tried to call Greger, but with no success. She did not even know if his mobile worked in other countries. Of course she could have tracked him down with a bit of effort, but she felt lazy to the core. Wrong--she felt helpless and paralysed.
She tried to call Blomkvist to tell him that the Borgsjo folder had been stolen, but he did not answer.
By 10:00 she had accomplished nothing and decided to go home. She was just reaching out to shut down her computer when her ICQ account pinged. She looked in astonishment at the icon bar. She knew what ICQ was but she seldom chatted, and she had not used the programme since starting at SMP.
She clicked hesitantly on Answer.
A trick? Poison Pen?
Berger swallowed. Only four people in the world knew how he had come by that scar. Salander was one of them.
Salander is a devil with computers. But how the hell is she managing to communicate from Sahlgrenska, where she's been isolated since April?
She doesn't want the police to know she has access to the Net. Of course not. Which is why she's chatting with the editor in chief of one of the biggest newspapers in Sweden.
Berger's heart beat furiously.
Berger could not believe she was asking this question. It was absurd. Salander was in rehabilitation at Sahlgrenska and was up to her neck in her own problems. She was the most unlikely person Berger could turn to with any hope of getting help.
Berger thought for a while before she replied.
<230 give or take, including the publishing company.>
Berger stared at the screen as she tried to work out what Salander was getting at.
Why am I not surprised?
Berger hesitated for ten seconds. Open up SMP to . . . what? A complete loony? Salander might be innocent of murder, but she was definitely not normal.
But what did she have to lose?
Berger stared in fascination at the screen as her computer slowly rebooted. She wondered whether she was crazy. Then her ICQ pinged.
Figuerola woke at 8:00 on Saturday morning, about two hours later than usual. She sat up in bed and looked at the man beside her. He was snoring. Well, nobody's perfect.
She wondered where this affair with Blomkvist was going to lead. He was obviously not the faithful type, so no point in looking forward to a long-term relationship. She knew that much from his biography. Anyway, she was not so sure she wanted a stable relationship herself--with a partner and a mortgage and kids. After a dozen failed relationships since her teens, she was tending towards the theory that stability was overrated. Her longest had been with a colleague in Uppsala--they had shared an apartment for two years.
But she was not someone who went in for one-night stands, although she did think that sex was an underrated therapy for just about all ailments. And sex with Blomkvist, out of shape as he was, was just fine. More than just fine, actually. Plus, he was a good person. He made her want more.
A summer romance? A love affair? Was she in love?
She went to the bathroom and washed her face and brushed her teeth. Then she put on her shorts and a thin jacket and quietly left the apartment. She stretched and went on a forty-five-minute run out past Ralambshov hospital and around Fredhall and back via Smedsudden. She was home by 9:00 and discovered Blomkvist still asleep. She bent down and bit him on the ear. He opened his eyes in bewilderment.
"Good morning, darling. I need somebody to scrub my back."
He looked at her and mumbled something.
"What did you say?"
"You don't need to take a shower. You're soaked to the skin already."
"I've been running. You should come along."
"If I tried to go at your pace, I'd have a heart attack on Norr Malarstrand."
"Nonsense. Come on, time to get up."
He scrubbed her back and soaped her shoulders. And her hips. And her stomach. And her breasts. And after a while she had completely lost interest in her shower and pulled him back to bed.
They had their coffee at the outdoor cafe beside Norr Malarstrand.
"You could turn out to be a bad habit," she said. "And we've only known each other a few days."
"I find you incredibly attractive. But you know that already."
"Why do you think that is?"
"Sorry, can't answer that question. I've never understood why I'm attracted to one woman and totally uninterested in another."
She smiled thoughtfully. "I have today off," she said.
"But I don't. I have a mountain of work before the trial begins, and I've spent the last three evenings with you instead of getting on with it."
"What a shame."
He stood up and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She took hold of his shirtsleeve.
"Blomkvist, I'd like to spend some more time with you."
"Same here. But it's going to be a little up and down until we put this story to bed."
He walked away down Hantverkargatan.
Berger got some coffee and watched the screen. For fifty-three minutes absolutely nothing happened except that her screen saver started up from time to time. Then her ICQ pinged again.
But Salander was gone from her ICQ. Berger stared at the screen in frustration. Finally she turned off the computer and went out to find a cafe where she could sit and think.
CHAPTER 20
Saturday, June 4
Blomkvist spent twenty-five minutes on the tunnelbana changing lines and going in different directions. He finally got off a bus at Slussen, jumped on the Katarina lift up to Mosebacke, and took a circuitous route to Fiskargatan 9. He had bought bread, milk, and cheese at the mini-mart next to the County Council building, and he put the groceries straight into the fridge. Then he turned on Salander's computer.
After a moment's thought he also turned on his Ericsson T10. He ignored his normal mobile because he did not want to talk to anyone who was not involved in the Zalachenko story. He saw that he had missed a number of calls in the past twenty-four hours: three from Cortez, two from Eriksson, and several from Berger.
First he called Cortez, who was in a cafe in Vasastad and had a few details to discuss, nothing urgent.
Eriksson had only called, she told him, to keep in touch.
Then he called Berger, whose line was busy.
He opened the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table] and found the final version of Salander's autobiographical statement. He smiled, printed out the document, and began to read it at once.
Salander switched on her Palm Tungsten T3. She had spent an hour infiltrating and charting the intranet at SMP with the help of Berger's account. She had not tackled the Peter Fleming account because she did not need to have full administrator rights. What she was interested in was access to SMP's personnel files. And Berger's account had complete access to those.
She fervently wished that Blomkvist had been kind enough to smuggle in her PowerBook with a real keyboard and a seventeen-inch screen instead of only the hand-held. She downloaded a list of everyone who worked at SMP and began to check them off. There were 223 employees, 82 of whom were women.
She began by crossing off all the women. She did not exclude women on the grounds of their being incapable of such folly, but statistics showed that the absolute majority of people who harassed women were men. That left 141 individuals.
Statistics also argued that the majority of poison pen artists were either teenagers or middle-aged. Since SMP did not have any teenagers on its staff, she drew an age curve and deleted everyone over fifty-five and under twenty-five. That left 103.
She thought for a moment. She did not have much time. Maybe not even twenty-four hours. She made a snap decision. She eliminated all employees in distribution, advertising, the photo department, maintenance, and IT. She focused on a group of journalists and editorial staff, forty-eight men between the ages of twenty-six and fifty-four.
Then she heard the rattle of a set of keys. She turned off the Palm and put it under the covers, between her thighs. This would be her last Saturday lunch at Sahlgrenska. She took stock of the cabbage stew with resignation. After lunch she would not, she knew, be able to work undisturbed for a while. She put the Palm in the recess behind the bedside table and waited while two Eritrean women vacuumed the room and changed her bed linen.
One of the women had regularly smuggled in a few Marlboro Lights for Salander during the past month. She had also given her a lighter, now hidden behind the bedside table. Salander gratefully accepted two cigarettes, which she planned to smoke by the vent window during the night.
Not until 2:00 p.m. was everything quiet again in her room. She took out the Palm and connected to the Net. She had intended to go straight back to SMP's administration, but she also had to deal with her own problems. She made her daily sweep, starting with the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]. She saw that Blomkvist had not uploaded anything new for three days and wondered what he was working on. The son of a bitch is
probably out screwing around with some bimbo with big boobs.
She then proceeded to the Yahoo group [The_Knights] and checked whether Plague had added anything. He had not.
Then she checked the hard drives of Ekstrom (some routine correspondence about the trial) and Teleborian.
Every time she accessed Teleborian's hard drive she felt as if her body temperature dropped a few degrees.
She found that he had already written her forensic psychiatric report, even though he was obviously not supposed to write it until after he had been given the opportunity to examine her. He had brushed up his prose, but there was nothing much new. She downloaded the report and sent it off to [Idiotic_Table]. She checked Teleborian's emails from the past twenty-four hours, clicking through one after another. She almost missed the terse message:
Saturday, 3:00 at the Ring in Central Station.
Jonas
Shit. Jonas. He was mentioned in a lot of correspondence with Teleborian. Used a Hotmail account. Not identified.
Salander glanced at the digital clock on her bedside table--2:28. She immediately pinged Blomkvist's ICQ. No response.
Blomkvist printed out the 220 pages of the manuscript that were finished. Then he shut off the computer and sat down at Salander's kitchen table with a red pencil.
He was pleased with the text. But there was still a gigantic, gaping hole. How could he find the remainder of the Section? Eriksson might be right: it might be impossible. He was running out of time.
Salander swore in frustration and pinged Plague. He did not answer either. She looked again at the clock--2:30.
She sat on the edge of the bed and tried Cortez next and then Eriksson. Saturday. Everybody's off work. 2:32.
Then she tried to reach Berger. No luck. I told her to go home. Shit. 2:33.
She should be able to send a text message to Blomkvist's mobile . . . but it was tapped. She bit her lip.
Finally, in desperation, she rang for the nurse.
It was 2:35 when she heard the key in the lock and Nurse Agneta looked in on her.
"Hello. Are you OK?"
"Is Dr. Jonasson on duty?"
"Aren't you feeling well?"
"I feel fine. But I need to have a few words with him. If possible."
"I saw him a little while ago. What's it about?"
"I just have to talk to him."
Nurse Agneta frowned. Lisbeth Salander had seldom rung for a nurse if she did not have a severe headache or some other equally serious problem. She never pestered them for anything and had never before asked to speak to a specific doctor. But Nurse Agneta had noticed that Dr. Jonasson had spent time with the patient who was under arrest and otherwise seemed withdrawn from the world. It was possible that he had established some sort of rapport.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest Page 42