Millennium 02 - The Girl Who Played with Fire

by Stieg Larsson

  “Hi, Sis.”

  “Hi. Anything new?”

  “I might be needing a good lawyer tomorrow.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Nothing too serious yet, but I might be arrested for obstructing a police investigation. But that’s not why I called. You couldn’t represent me anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I want you to take on the defence of Lisbeth Salander, and you can’t look after both of us.”

  Blomkvist gave her a rapid rundown of the story. Giannini was ominously silent. Finally she said, “And you have documentation of all this…”

  “I do.”

  “I’d have to think it over. Lisbeth really needs a criminal lawyer.”

  “You’d be perfect.”

  “Micke…”

  “Listen, you were the one who was furious with me because I didn’t ask for help when I needed it.”

  When they’d finished their conversation, Blomkvist sat thinking. Then he picked up his mobile and called Holger Palmgren. He didn’t have any particular reason for doing so, but he wanted to tell him that he was following up one or two leads, and that he hoped the whole story would be resolved within the next few hours.

  The problem was that Salander had leads too.

  • • •

  Salander reached for an apple in her backpack without taking her eyes off the farm. She lay stretched out at the edge of the woods with a floor mat from the Corolla as a groundsheet. She had taken off her wig and changed into green tracksuit pants with pockets, a thick sweater, and a midlength windbreaker with a thermal lining.

  Gosseberga Farm lay about four hundred yards from the road. There were four buildings. The main building was about a hundred and twenty yards in front of her, an ordinary white-frame house on two floors, with a shed and a barn seventy yards beyond the farmhouse. Through the barn door she could see the front of a white car. She thought it was a Volvo, but it was too far away for her to be sure.

  Between her and the main building there was a muddy field that extended to the right about two hundred yards down towards a pond. The driveway cut through the field and disappeared into a small stand of trees towards the road. Next to the road there was another farmhouse that looked to be abandoned; the windows were covered with plastic sheeting. Beyond the main building was a grove of trees that served to block the view of the nearest neighbour, a clump of buildings almost six hundred yards away. So the farm in front of her was relatively isolated.

  She was close to Lake Anten in an area of rounded glacial moraines where fields alternated with small communities and dense woodland. The road map gave no detail, but she had followed the black Renault from Göteborg along the E20 and turned west towards Sollebrunn in Alingsås district. After about forty minutes the car made a sharp turn onto a forest road at a sign that said GOSSEBERGA. She had driven on and parked behind a barn in a clump of trees about a hundred yards north of the access road, then returned on foot.

  She had never heard of Gosseberga, but as far as she could tell the name referred to the house and barn in front of her. She had passed the mailbox on the road. Painted on it was P.O. BOX 192—?. A. BODIN. The name meant nothing to her.

  She had made a wide circuit of the buildings and finally selected her lookout spot. She had the afternoon sun at her back. Since she’d gotten into position at around 3:30, only one thing had happened. At 4:00 the driver of the Renault came out of the house. He exchanged some words in the doorway with someone she could not see. Then he drove away and did not come back. Otherwise she had seen no movement at the farm. She waited patiently and watched the building through a pair of Minolta 8x binoculars.

  • • •

  Blomkvist drummed his fingers in annoyance on the tabletop in the restaurant car. The X2000 had stopped in Katrineholm and had been standing there for almost an hour. There was some malfunction in one of the carriages that had to be fixed. An announcement apologized for the delay.

  He sighed in frustration and ordered more coffee. At last, fifteen minutes later, the train started up with a jerk. He looked at his watch. 8:00 p.m.

  He should have taken a plane or rented a car.

  He was now even more troubled by the feeling that he had started too late.

  At around 6:00 p.m. someone had turned on a lamp in a room on the ground floor, and shortly after that an oil lamp was lit. Salander glimpsed shadows in what she imagined was the kitchen, to the right of the front door, but she could not make out any faces.

  Then the front door opened and the giant named Ronald Niedermann came out. He wore dark trousers and a tight T-shirt that emphasized his muscles. She had been right. She saw once more that Niedermann really was massive. But he was flesh and blood like everyone else, no matter what Paolo Roberto and Miriam Wu had been through. Niedermann walked around the house and went into the barn where the car was parked. He came out with a small bag and went back inside the house.

  After only a few minutes he appeared again. He was accompanied by a short, thin older man who was using a crutch. It was too dark for Salander to make out his features, but she felt an icy chill creep along the back of her neck.

  Daaaddyyy, I’m heeeere…

  She watched Zalachenko and Niedermann as they walked up the road. They stopped at the shed, where Niedermann collected some firewood. Then they went back to the house and closed the door.

  Salander lay still for several minutes. Then she lowered her binoculars and retreated until she was completely concealed among the trees. She opened her backpack, took out a thermos, and poured some coffee. She put a lump of sugar in her mouth and began to suck on it. She ate a cheese sandwich she had bought earlier in the day on the way to Göteborg. As she ate she thought about the situation.

  After she had finished she took out Nieminen’s Polish P-83 Wanad. She ejected the magazine and checked that nothing was blocking the bolt or the bore. She did a blind fire. She had six rounds of 9 mm Makarov. That should be enough. She shoved the magazine back in place and chambered a round. She put the safety catch on and slipped the weapon into her right-hand jacket pocket.

  Salander began her advance towards the house, moving in a circle through the woods. She had gone about a hundred and fifty yards when suddenly she stopped in mid-stride.

  In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, Pierre de Fermat had jotted the words I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.

  The square had been converted to a cube, (x3 + y3 = z3), and mathematicians had spent centuries looking for the answer to Fermat’s riddle. By the time Andrew Wiles solved the puzzle in the 1990s, he had been at it for ten years using the world’s most advanced computer programme.

  And all of a sudden she understood. The answer was so disarmingly simple. A game with numbers that lined up and then fell into place in a simple formula that was most similar to a rebus.

  Fermat had no computer, of course, and Wiles’ solution was based on mathematics that had not been invented when Fermat formulated his theorem. Fermat would never have been able to produce the proof that Wiles had presented. Fermat’s solution was quite different.

  She was so stunned that she had to sit down on a tree stump. She gazed straight ahead as she checked the equation.

  So that’s what he meant. No wonder mathematicians were tearing out their hair.

  Then she giggled.

  A philosopher would have had a better chance of solving this riddle.

  She wished she could have known Fermat.

  He was a cocky devil.

  After a while she stood up and continued her approach through the trees. She kept the barn between her and the house.

  CHAPTER 31

  Thursday, April 7

  Salander got into the barn through the outside hatch to an old manure drain. There were no livestock. She saw that the barn contained three cars—the white Volvo from Auto-Expert, an old Ford, and a somewhat newer Saab. Further in was a rusty harro
w and other tools from the days when this had been a working farm.

  She lingered in the darkness of the barn and watched the house. It was dusk and the lights were on in all the rooms on the ground floor. She couldn’t see any movement, but she thought she saw the flickering glow of a television set. She glanced at her watch. 7:30. Time for Rapport.

  She was surprised that Zalachenko would have chosen to live in such an isolated place. It was not like the man she remembered. She would never have expected to find him out in the country in a little white farmhouse. In some anonymous villa community, maybe, or in a vacation spot abroad. He must have made more enemies even than Salander herself. She was troubled that the place looked so undefended. But she had no doubt that he had weapons in the house.

  After lingering for a long time, she slipped out of the barn into the twilight. She hurried across the yard, keeping her step light and her back to the facade of the house. Then she heard the faint sound of music. She walked noiselessly around the house and tried to peer through the windows, but they were too high.

  Salander was instinctively uneasy. For the first half of her life she had lived in fear of the man inside that house. During the second half, ever since she had failed in her attempt to kill him, she had waited for the moment when he would come back into her life. This time she wasn’t going to make any mistakes.

  Zalachenko might be an old cripple, but he was a trained assassin who had survived on more than one field of battle. Besides, there was Ronald Niedermann to take into account. She would have much preferred to surprise Zalachenko outdoors, where he would be unprotected. She had no wish to talk to him and would have been satisfied with a rifle and a telescopic lens. But she had no rifle, and it was unlikely that he’d be taking an evening stroll. If she wanted to wait for a better opportunity, she would have to withdraw and spend the night in the woods. She had no sleeping bag, and even though the evening was mild, the night would be cold. Now that she had him within reach, she didn’t want to risk letting him slip away again. She thought about Miriam Wu and about her mother.

  She would have to get inside the house, but that was the worst possible scenario. Sure, she could knock on the door and fire her gun as soon as the door opened, and then go in to find the other bastard. But whoever was left would be alerted, and he would probably be armed. Time for a risk assessment. What were the options?

  She caught sight of Niedermann’s profile as he walked past a window only a few yards from her. He was saying something over his shoulder to someone.

  Both of them were in the room to the left of the front door.

  Salander made up her mind. She took the pistol out of her jacket pocket, clicked off the safety, and moved silently onto the porch. She held the gun in her left hand as she pressed the front door handle down with excruciating caution. It was unlocked. She frowned and hesitated. The door had double dead bolts.

  Zalachenko should not have left the door unlocked. It was giving her goose bumps on the back of her neck.

  It felt wrong.

  The hallway was black as pitch. To the right she glimpsed the stairs to the upper floor. There were two doors straight ahead and one to the left. Light was seeping through a crack above the door. She stood still and listened. Then she heard a voice and the scraping of a chair in the room to the left.

  She took two swift steps and threw open the door and aimed her gun at… the room was empty.

  She heard the rustle of clothing behind her and spun around like a lizard. As she tried to raise the gun to firing position, one of Niedermann’s enormous hands closed like an iron vise around her neck and the other clamped around her gun hand. He held her by the neck and lifted her straight up in the air as if she were a doll.

  For a moment she kicked her feet in midair. Then she twisted around and kicked at Niedermann’s crotch. She hit his hip instead. It felt like kicking a tree trunk. Her vision was going black as he squeezed her neck and she felt herself drop the gun.

  Fuckers.

  Then Niedermann threw her across the room. She landed on a sofa with a crash and slid to the floor. She felt blood rushing to her head and staggered to her feet. She saw a heavy glass ashtray on a table and grabbed it and tried to fling it backhand. Niedermann caught her arm in mid-swing. She reached into her left pants pocket with her free hand and pulled out the Taser, twisting around to shove it into Niedermann’s crotch.

  She felt a hefty jolt from the electric shock come through the arm Niedermann was holding her with. She had expected him to collapse in pain. Instead he looked down at her with a surprised expression. Salander’s eyes widened in alarm. He seemed to experience some unpleasantness, but if he felt any pain he ignored it. This man is not normal.

  Niedermann bent and took the Taser from her and examined it with a puzzled look. Then he slapped her across the head. It was like being hit with a club. She tumbled to the floor next to the sofa. She looked up and saw that Niedermann was watching her curiously, as if wondering what her next move would be. Like a cat getting ready to play with its prey.

  Then she sensed a movement in the doorway. She turned her head.

  He came slowly into the light.

  He was leaning on a forearm crutch and she could see a prosthesis sticking out from his pants leg. There were two fingers missing from his left hand.

  She raised her eyes to his face. The left half was a patchwork of scar tissue. His ear was a little stump and he had no eyebrows. He was bald. She remembered him as a virile and athletic man with wavy black hair. Now he was about five foot four, and emaciated.

  “Hello, Pappa,” she said tonelessly.

  Alexander Zalachenko regarded his daughter without expression.

  Niedermann turned on the ceiling light. He checked that she had no more weapons by running his hands over her clothes and then clicked the safety on the P-83 Wanad and released the magazine. Zalachenko shuffled past them, sat in an armchair, and picked up a remote control.

  Salander’s eyes fell on the TV behind him. Zalachenko pressed the remote, and she saw a green flickering image of the area behind the barn and part of the driveway to the house. Infrared camera. They had known she was coming.

  “I was beginning to think that you wouldn’t dare to make an approach,” Zalachenko said. “We’ve been watching you since 4:00. You tripped just about every alarm around the farm.”

  “Motion detectors,” Salander said.

  “Two by the road and four in the clearing on the other side of the field. You set up your observation post on precisely the spot where we’d positioned alarms. It’s the best view of the farm. Usually it’s moose or deer, and sometimes berry-pickers who come too close. But we don’t often get to see somebody sneak up to the front door with a gun in their hand.” He paused for a moment. “Did you really think Zalachenko would sit in his little house in the country completely unprotected?”

  Salander massaged the back of her neck and began to get up.

  “Stay there on the floor,” Zalachenko said.

  Niedermann stopped fiddling with the gun and watched her quietly. He raised an eyebrow and smiled at her. Salander remembered Paolo Roberto’s battered face on TV and decided it would be a good idea to stay on the floor. She breathed out and leaned back against the sofa.

  Zalachenko held out his intact right hand. Niedermann pulled a weapon out of his waistband, cocked it, and gave it to him. Salander noticed that it was a Sig Sauer, standard police issue. Zalachenko nodded, and Niedermann turned away and put on a jacket. He left the room and Salander heard the front door open and close.

  “In case you get any stupid ideas, if you even try to get up I’ll shoot you right in the gut.”

  Salander relaxed. He might manage to get off two, maybe three shots before she could reach him, and he was probably using ammo that would make her bleed to death in a few minutes.

  “You look like shit,” Zalachenko said. “Like a fucking whore. But you’ve got my eyes.”

  “Does it hurt?” she asked, nodding
at his prosthesis.

  Zalachenko looked at her for a long time. “No. Not anymore.”

  Salander stared at him.

  “You’d really like to kill me, wouldn’t you?” he said.

  She said nothing. He laughed.

  “I’ve thought about you over the years. In fact almost every time I look in the mirror.”

  “You should have left my mother alone.”

  “Your mother was a whore.”

  Salander’s eyes turned black as coal. “She was no whore. She worked as a cashier in a supermarket and tried to make ends meet.”

  Zalachenko laughed again. “You can have whatever fantasies you want about her. But I know that she was a whore. And she made sure to get pregnant right away and then tried to get me to marry her. As if I’d marry a whore.”

  Salander looked down the barrel of the gun and hoped he would relax his concentration for an instant.

  “The firebomb was sneaky. I hated you for that. But in time it didn’t matter. You weren’t worth the energy. If you’d only let things be.”

  “Bullshit. Bjurman asked you to fix me.”

  “That was another thing entirely. He needed a film that you have, so I made a little business deal.”

  “And you thought I’d give the film to you.”

  “Yes, my dear daughter. I’m convinced that you would have. You have no idea how cooperative people can be when Ronald asks for something. And especially when he starts up a chain saw and saws off one of your feet. In this case it would have been appropriate compensation—a foot for a foot.”

  Salander thought about Miriam at the hands of Niedermann in the warehouse. Zalachenko misinterpreted her expression.

  “You don’t have to worry. We don’t intend to cut you up. But tell me: did Bjurman rape you?”

  She said nothing.

  “Damn, what appalling taste he must have had. I read in the paper that you’re some sort of fucking dyke. That’s no surprise. There can’t be a man who’d want you.”

  Salander still said nothing.