Millennium 03 - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

by Stieg Larsson

“No, but I could see that something happened just now that got you more agitated than I’ve seen you in all the time you’ve been in my care. I hope you know what you’re doing.”

  Salander gave Jonasson a lopsided smile.

  “You should have the answer to that question quite soon,” she said.

  Cortez left the Academy bookshop running like a madman. He crossed Sveavägen on the viaduct at Mäster Samuelsgatan and went straight down to Klara Norra, where he turned up the Klaraberg viaduct and across Vasagatan. He flew across Klarabergsgatan between a bus and two cars, one of whose drivers punched his windscreen in fury, and through the doors of Central Station as the station clock ticked over to 3.00 sharp.

  He took the escalator three steps at a time down to the main ticket hall, and jogged past the Pocket bookshop before slowing down so as not to attract attention. He scanned every face of every person standing or walking near the Ring.

  He did not see Teleborian or the man Malm had photographed outside Café Copacabana, whom they believed to be Jonas. He looked back at the clock. 3.01. He was gasping as if he had just run a marathon.

  He took a chance and hurried across the hall and out through the doors on to Vasagatan. He stopped and looked about him, checking one face after another, as far as his eyes could see. No Teleborian. No Jonas.

  He turned back into the station. 3.03. The Ring area was almost deserted.

  Then he looked up and got a split second’s glimpse of Teleborian’s dishevelled profile and goatee as he came out of Pressbyrån on the other side of the ticket hall. A second later the man from Malm’s photograph materialized at Teleborian’s side. Jonas. They crossed the concourse and went out on to Vasagatan by the north door.

  Cortez exhaled in relief. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and set off in pursuit of the two men.

  Blomkvist’s taxi got to Central Station at 3.07. He walked rapidly into the ticket hall, but he could see neither Teleborian nor anyone looking like they might be Jonas. Nor Cortez for that matter.

  He was about to call Cortez when the T10 rang in his hand.

  “I’ve got them. They’re sitting in the Tre Remmare pub on Vasagatan by the stairs down to the Akalla line.”

  “Thanks, Henry. Where are you?”

  “I’m at the bar. Having my afternoon beer. I earned it.”

  “Very good. They know what I look like, so I’ll stay out of it. I don’t suppose you have any chance of hearing what they’re saying.”

  “Not a hope. I can only see Jonas’ back and that bloody psychoanalyst mumbles when he speaks, so I can’t even see his lips move.”

  “I get it.”

  “But we may have a problem.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Jonas has put his wallet and mobile on the table. And he put his car keys on top of the wallet.”

  “O.K. I’ll handle it.”

  Figuerola’s mobile played out the theme tune from Once Upon a Time in the West. She put down her book about God in antiquity. It did not seem as though she would ever be able to finish it

  “Hi. It’s Mikael. What are you up to?”

  “I’m sitting at home sorting through my collection of photographs of old lovers. I was ignominiously ditched earlier today.”

  “Do you have your car nearby?”

  “The last time I checked it was in the parking space outside.”

  “Good. Do you feel like an afternoon on the town?”

  “Not particularly. What’s going on?”

  “A psychiatrist called Teleborian is having a beer with an undercover agent – code name Jonas – down on Vasagatan. And since I’m co-operating with your Stasi-style bureaucracy, I thought you might be amused to tag along.”

  Figuerola was on her feet and reaching for her car keys.

  “This is not your little joke, is it?”

  “Hardly. And Jonas has his car keys on the table in front of him.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  Eriksson did not answer the telephone, but Blomkvist got lucky and caught Karim, who had been at Åhlens department store buying a birthday present for her husband. He asked her to please – on overtime – hurry over to the pub as back-up for Cortez. Then he called Cortez.

  “Here’s the plan. I’ll have a car in place in five minutes. It’ll be on Järnvägsgatan, down the street from the pub. Lottie is going to join you in a few minutes as back-up.”

  “Good.”

  “When they leave the pub, you tail Jonas. Keep me posted by mobile. As soon as you see him approach a car, we have to know. Lottie will follow Teleborian. If we don’t get there in time, make a note of his registration number.”

  “O.K.”

  Figuerola parked beside the Nordic Light Hotel next to the Arlanda Express platforms. Blomkvist opened the driver’s door a minute later.

  “Which pub are they in?”

  Blomkvist told her.

  “I have to call for support.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t. We’ve got them covered. Too many cooks might wreck the whole dish.”

  Figuerola gave him a sceptical look. “And how did you know that this meeting was going to take place?”

  “I have to protect my source. Sorry.”

  “Do you have your own bloody intelligence service at Millennium?” she burst out.

  Blomkvist looked pleased. It was cool to outdo Säpo in their own field of expertise.

  In fact he did not have the slightest idea how Berger came to call him out of the blue to tell him of the meeting. She had not had access to ongoing editorial work at Millennium since early April. She knew about Teleborian, to be sure, but Jonas had not come into the picture until May. As far as he knew, Berger had not even known of his existence, let alone that he was the focus of intense speculation both at Säpo and Millennium.

  He needed to talk to Berger.

  Salander pressed her lips together and looked at the screen of her handheld. After using Jonasson’s mobile, she had pushed all thoughts of the Section to one side and concentrated on Berger’s problem. She had next, after careful consideration, eliminated all the men in the twenty-six to fifty-four age group who were married. She was working with a broad brush, of that she was perfectly aware. The selection was scarcely based on any statistical, sociological or scientific rationale. Poison Pen might easily be a married man with five children and a dog. He might also be a man who worked in maintenance. “He” could even be a woman.

  She simply needed to prune the number of names on the list, and her group was now down from forty-eight to eighteen since her latest cut. The list was made up largely of the better-known reporters, managers or middle managers aged thirty-five or older. If she did not find anything of interest in that group, she could always widen the net again.

  At 4.00 she logged on to Hacker Republic and uploaded the list to Plague. He pinged her a few minutes later.

  She outlined the Poison Pen situation.

  She sent him the access codes for S.M.P.’s newsroom and then logged off from I.C.Q.

  It was 4.20 before Cortez called.

  “They’re showing signs of leaving.”

  “We’re ready.”

  Silence.

  “They’re going their separate ways outside the pub. Jonas heading north. Teleborian to the south. Lottie’s going after him.”

  Blomkvist raised a finger and pointed as Jonas flashed past them on Vasagatan. Figuerola nodded and started the engine. Seconds later Blomkvist could also see Cortez.

  “He’s crossing Vasagatan, heading towards Kungsgatan,” Cortez said into his mobile.

  “Keep your distance so he doesn’t spot you.”

  “Quite a few people out.”

  Silence.

  “He’s turning north on Kungsgatan.”

  “North on Kungsgatan,” Blomkvist said.

  Figuerola changed gear and turned up Vasagatan. They were stopped by a red light.

  “Where is he now?” Blomkvist said as they turned on
to Kungsgatan.

  “Opposite P.U.B. department store. He’s walking fast. Whoops, he’s turned up Drottninggatan heading north.”

  “Drottninggatan heading north,” Blomkvist said.

  “Right,” Figuerola said, making an illegal turn on to Klara Norra and heading towards Olof Palmes Gata. She turned and braked outside the S.I.F. building. Jonas crossed Olof Palmes Gata and turned up towards Sveavägen. Cortez stayed on the other side of the street.

  “He turned east—”

  “We can see you both.”

  “He’s turning down Holländargatan. Hello… Car. Red Audi.”

  “Car,” Blomkvist said, writing down the registration number Cortez read off to him.

  “Which way is he facing?” Figuerola said.

  “Facing south,” Cortez reported. “He’s pulling out in front of you on Olof Palmes Gata … now.”

  Monica was already on her way and passing Drottninggatan. She signalled and headed off a couple of pedestrians who tried to sneak across even though their light was red.

  “Thanks, Henry. We’ll take him from here.”

  The red Audi turned south on Sveavägen. As Figuerola followed she flipped open her mobile with her left hand and punched in a number.

  “Could I get an owner of a red Audi?” she said, rattling off the number.

  “Jonas Sandberg, born 1971. What did you say? Helsingörsgatan, Kista. Thanks.”

  Blomkvist wrote down the information.

  They followed the red Audi via Hamngatan to Strandvägen and then straight up to Artillerigatan. Jonas parked a block away from the Armémuseum. He walked across the street and through the front door of an 1890s building.

  “Interesting,” Figuerola said, turning to Blomkvist.

  Jonas Sandberg had entered a building that was only a block away from the apartment the Prime Minister had borrowed for their private meeting.

  “Nicely done,” Figuerola said.

  Just then Karim called and told them that Teleborian had gone up on to Klarabergsgatan via the escalators in Central Station and from there to police headquarters on Kungsholmen.

  “Police headquarters at 5.00 on a Saturday afternoon?”

  Figuerola and Blomkvist exchanged a sceptical look. Monica pondered this turn of events for a few seconds. Then she picked up her mobile and called Criminal Inspector Jan Bublanski.

  “Hello, it’s Monica from S.I.S. We met on Norr Mälarstrand a while back.”

  “What do you want?” Bublanski said.

  “Have you got anybody on duty this weekend?”

  “Modig,” Bublanski said.

  “I need a favour. Do you know if she’s at headquarters?”

  “I doubt it. It’s beautiful weather and Saturday afternoon.”

  “Could you possibly reach her or anyone else on the investigative team who might be able to take a look in Prosecutor Ekström’s corridor … to see if there’s a meeting going on in his office at the moment.”

  “What sort of meeting?”

  “I can’t explain just yet. I just need to know if he has a meeting with anybody right now. And if so, who.”

  “You want me to spy on a prosecutor who happens to be my superior?”

  Figuerola raised her eyebrows. Then she shrugged. “Yes, I do.”

  “I’ll do what I can,” he said and hung up.

  Sonja Modig was closer to police headquarters than Bublanski had thought. She was having coffee with her husband on the balcony of a friend’s place in Vasastaden. Their children were away with her parents who had taken them on a week’s holiday, and they planned to do something as old-fashioned as have a bite to eat and go to the movies.

  Bublanski explained why he was calling.

  “And what sort of excuse would I have to barge in on Ekström?” Modig asked.

  “I promised to give him an update on Niedermann yesterday, but in fact I forgot to deliver it to his office before I left. It’s on my desk.”

  “O.K.,” said Modig. She looked at her husband and her friend. “I have to go in to H.Q. I’ll take the car and with a little luck I’ll be back in an hour.”

  Her husband sighed. Her friend sighed.

  “I’m on call this weekend,” Modig said in apology.

  She parked on Bergsgatan, took the lift up to Bublanski’s office, and picked up the three A4 pages that comprised the meagre results of their search for Niedermann. Not much to hang on the Christmas tree, she thought.

  She took the stairs up to the next floor and stopped at the door to the corridor. Headquarters was almost deserted on this summer afternoon. She was not exactly sneaking around. She was just walking very quietly. She stopped outside Ekström’s closed door. She heard voices and all of a sudden her courage deserted her. She felt a fool. In any normal situation she would have knocked on the door, pushed it open and exclaimed, “Hello! So you’re still here?” and then sailed right in. Now it seemed all wrong.

  She looked around.

  Why had Bublanski called her? What was this meeting about?

  She glanced across the corridor. Opposite Ekström’s office was a conference room big enough for ten people. She had sat through a number of presentations there herself. She went into the room and closed the door. The blinds were down, and the glass partition to the corridor was covered by curtains. It was dark. She pulled up a chair and sat down, then opened the curtains a crack so that she would have a view of the corridor.

  She felt uneasy. If anyone opened the door she would have quite a problem explaining what she was doing there. She took out her mobile and looked at the time display. Just before 6.00. She changed the ring to silent and leaned back in her chair, watching the door of Ekström’s office.

  At 7.00 Plague pinged Salander.

  He sent over a U.R.L.

  She logged out and went to the U.R.L. where Plague had uploaded all the administrator rights for S.M.P. She started by checking whether Fleming was online and at work. He was not. So she borrowed his identity and went into S.M.P.’s mail server. That way she could look at all the activity in the email system, even messages that had long since been deleted from individual accounts.

  She started with Ernst Teodor Billing, one of the night editors at S.M.P., forty-three years old. She opened his mail and began to click back in time. She spent about two seconds on each message, just long enough to get an idea of who sent it and what it was about. After a few minutes she had worked out what was routine mail in the form of daily memos, schedules and other uninteresting stuff. She started to scroll past these.

  She went through three months’ worth of messages one by one. Then she skipped month to month and read only the subject lines, opening the message only if it was something that caught her attention. She learned that Billing was going out with a woman named Sofia and that he used an unpleasant tone with her. She saw that this was nothing unusual, since Billing took an unpleasant tone with most of the people to whom he wrote messages – reporters, layout artists and others. Even so, she thought it odd that a man would consistently address his girlfriend with the words fucking fatty, fucking airhead or fucking cunt.

  After an hour of searching, she shut down Billing and crossed him off the list. She moved on to Lars Örjan Wollberg, a veteran reporter at fifty-one who was on the legal desk.

  Edklinth walked into police headquarters at 7.30 on Saturday evening. Figuerola and Blomkvist were waiting for him. They were sitting at the same conference table at which Blomkvist had sat the day before.

  Edklinth reminded himself that he was on very thin ice and that a host of regulations had been violated when he gave Blomkvist access to the corridor. Figuerola most definitely had no right to invite him here on her own authority. Even the spouses of his colleagues were not permitted in the corridors of S.I.S., but were asked instead to wait on the landings if they were meeting their partner. And to cap it all, Blomkvist was a journalist. From now on Blomkvist would be allowed only into the temporary office at Fridhemsplan.

  But
outsiders were allowed into the corridors by special invitation. Foreign guests, researchers, academics, freelance consultants … he put Blomkvist into the category of freelance consultant. All this nonsense about security classification was little more than words anyway. Someone decides that a certain person should be given a particular level of clearance. And Edklinth had decided that if criticism were raised, he would say that he personally had given Blomkvist clearance.

  If something went wrong, that is. He sat down and looked at Figuerola.

  “How did you find out about the meeting?”

  “Blomkvist called me at around 4.00,” she said with a satisfied smile.

  Edklinth turned to Blomkvist. “And how did you find out about the meeting?”

  “Tipped off by a source.”

  “Am I to conclude that you’re running some sort of surveillance on Teleborian?”

  Figuerola shook her head. “That was my first thought too,” she said in a cheerful voice, as if Blomkvist were not in the room. “But it doesn’t add up. Even if somebody were following Teleborian for Blomkvist, that person could not have known in advance that he was on his way to meet Jonas Sandberg.”

  “So … what else? Illegal tapping or something?” Edklinth said.

  “I can assure you,” Blomkvist said to remind them that he was there in the room, “that I’m not conducting illegal eavesdropping on anyone. Be realistic. Illegal tapping is the domain of government authorities.”

  Edklinth frowned. “So you aren’t going to tell us how you heard about the meeting?”

  “I’ve already told you that I won’t. I was tipped off by a source. The source is protected. Why don’t we concentrate on what we’ve discovered?”

  “I don’t like loose ends,” Edklinth said. “But O.K. What have you found out?”

  “His name is Jonas Sandberg,” Figuerola said. “Trained as a navy frogman and then attended the police academy in the early ’90s. Worked first in Uppsala and then in Södertälje.”

  “You’re from Uppsala.”

  “Yes, but we missed each other by about a year. He was recruited by S.I.S. Counter-Espionage in 1998. Reassigned to a secret post abroad in 2000. According to our documents, he’s at the embassy in Madrid. I checked with the embassy. They have no record of a Jonas Sandberg on their staff.”