The Girl in the Spider's Web

by David Lagercrantz

  “Jesus, Jesus,” he muttered—which was at least a sign that he was beginning to recover some of his composure.

  But then the text went on: at which point he gave a loud cry. The word “Root” brought down his whole world. For about a minute, as the computer raced through the most confidential parts of the system at lightning speed, he genuinely believed that he was going to have a heart attack. He was only vaguely aware that people were beginning to gather around his desk.

  —

  There was not much of a crowd down at the Bishops Arms. It was only early in the afternoon, and the weather was not encouraging people to venture out, not even to the local pub. Blomkvist was nevertheless met by shouts and laughter, and by a hoarse voice bawling:

  “Kalle Blomkvist!”

  It came from a man with a puffy red face, a halo of frizzy hair, and a fussy moustache whom Blomkvist had seen many times in the area. He thought his name was Arne. Arne would turn up at the pub as regularly as clockwork at 2:00 every afternoon, but today he had clearly come earlier than that and settled down at a table to the left of the bar with three drinking companions.

  “Mikael Blomkvist,” Blomkvist corrected him, with a smile.

  Arne and his friends laughed as if Blomkvist’s actual name was the greatest joke ever.

  “Got any good scoops?” Arne said.

  “I’m thinking about blowing wide open the whole murky scene at the Bishops Arms.”

  “You reckon Sweden’s ready for a story like that?”

  “No, probably not.”

  In truth Blomkvist quite liked this crowd, not that he ever talked to them more than in throwaway lines and banter. But these men were a part of the local scene which made him feel at home in the area, and he was not in the least bit offended when one of them shot out, “I’ve heard that you’re washed up.”

  Far from upsetting him, it brought the whole campaign against him down to the low, almost farcical level where it belonged.

  “I’ve been washed up for the last fifteen years, hello to you brother bottle, all good things must pass,” he said, quoting the poet Fröding and looking around for someone who might have had the gall to order a tired journalist down to the pub. Since he saw no-one apart from Arne and his gang, he went up to Amir at the bar.

  Amir was big and fat and jolly, a hardworking father of four who had been running the pub for some years. He and Blomkvist had become good friends. Not because Blomkvist was an especially regular customer, but because they had helped each other out in completely different ways; once or twice when Blomkvist had not had the time to get to the state liquor store and was expecting female company, Amir had supplied him with a couple of bottles of red wine, and Blomkvist in turn had helped a friend of Amir’s, who had no papers, to write letters to the authorities.

  “To what do we owe this honour?” Amir said.

  “I’m meeting someone.”

  “Anyone exciting?”

  “I don’t think so. How’s Sara?”

  Sara was Amir’s wife and had just had a hip operation.

  “Complaining and taking painkillers.”

  “Sounds like hard work. Give her my best.”

  “Will do,” Amir said, and they chatted about this and that.

  But Linus Brandell did not show up and Blomkvist thought it was probably a practical joke. On the other hand there were worse tricks to fall victim to than to be lured down to your local pub, so he stayed for fifteen minutes discussing a number of financial and health-related concerns before he turned and walked towards the door, and that is when Brandell appeared.

  —

  Nobody understood how Gabriella Grane had ended up at Säpo, Swedish Security Police, least of all she herself. She had been the sort of girl for whom everybody had predicted a glittering future. Her old girlfriends from the classy suburb of Djursholm worried that she was thirty-three and neither famous nor wealthy nor married, either to a rich man or to any man at all for that matter.

  “What’s happened to you, Gabriella? Are you going to be a policeman all your life?”

  Most of the time she could not be bothered to argue, or point out that she was not a police officer but had been head-hunted for the position of analyst, and that these days she was writing far more challenging texts than she ever had at the Foreign Ministry or during her summers as a leader writer for Svenska Dagbladet. Apart from which, she was not allowed to talk about most of it in any case. So she might as well keep quiet and simply come to terms with the fact that working for the Swedish Security Police was considered to be about as low as you can go—both by her status-obsessed friends and even more so by her intellectual pals.

  In their eyes, Säpo was a bunch of clumsy right-leaning idiots who went after Kurds and Arabs for what were fundamentally racist reasons and who had no qualms about committing serious crimes or infringements of civil rights in order to protect former senior Soviet spies. And indeed, sometimes she was on their side. There was incompetence in the organization, values that were unsound, and the Zalachenko affair remained a major blot. But that was not the whole truth. Stimulating and important work was being done as well, especially now after the shakeout, and sometimes she had the impression that it was at Säpo, not in any editorial or lecture hall, that people best understood the upheavals that were taking place across the world. But she still often asked herself: How did I end up here, and why have I stayed?

  Presumably some of it came down to flattery. No less a person than Helena Kraft, the newly appointed chief of Säpo at the time, had contacted her and said that after all the disasters and bad press they had to rethink their approach to recruitment. We need to “bring on board the real talents from the universities and, quite honestly, Gabriella, there’s no better person than you.” That was all it had taken.

  Grane was hired as an analyst in counter-espionage and later in the Industry Protection Group. Even though as a young woman, attractive in a slightly proper sort of way, she got called a “daddy’s girl” and “snotty upper-class bitch,” she was a star recruit, quick and receptive and able to think outside the box. And she could speak Russian. She had learned it alongside her studies at the Stockholm School of Economics, where needless to say she had been a model student but never that keen. She dreamed of something bigger than a life in business, so after her graduation she applied for a job at the Foreign Ministry and was accepted. But she did not find that especially stimulating either—the diplomats were too stiff and neatly combed. It was then that Helena Kraft had gotten in touch. Grane had been at Säpo for five years now and had gradually been accepted for the talent that she was, even if it was not always easy.

  It had been a trying day, and not just because of the ghastly weather. The head of the division, Ragnar Olofsson, had appeared in her office looking surly and humourless and told her that she should damn well not be flirting when she was out on an assignment.

  “Flirting?”

  “Flowers have been delivered.”

  “And that’s my fault?”

  “Yes, I do think you have a responsibility there. When we’re out in the field we have to show discipline and reserve at all times. We represent an absolutely key public agency.”

  “Well, that’s great, Ragnar dear. One always learns something from you. Now I finally understand that I’m responsible for the fact that the head of research at Ericsson can’t tell the difference between normal polite behaviour and flirting. Now I realize that I should blame myself when men indulge in such wildly wishful thinking that they see a sexual invitation in a simple smile.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Olofsson said, and he disappeared.

  Later she regretted having answered back. That kind of outburst rarely does any good. On the other hand, she had been taking shit for far too long. It was time to stand up for herself. She quickly tidied her desk and got out a report from GCHQ in Britain about Russian industrial espionage against European softwa
re companies, which she had not yet had time to read. Then the telephone rang. It was Kraft, and that made Grane happy. She had never yet called to complain or moan. On the contrary.

  “I’ll get straight to the point,” Kraft said. “I’ve had a call from the United States, it may be a bit of an emergency. Can you take it on your Cisco? We’ve arranged a secure line.”

  “Of course.”

  “Good, I’d like you to interpret the information for me, see if there’s anything in it. It sounds serious, but I can’t get a handle on the person who’s passing it on—who, by the way, says that she knows you.”

  “Put me through.”

  It was Alona Casales at the NSA—although for a moment Grane wondered if it really was her. When they had last met, at a conference in Washington, D.C., Casales had been a self-assured and charismatic lecturer in what she somewhat euphemistically described as active signals surveillance: hacking, in other words. Afterwards she and Grane had gone out for drinks, and almost against her will, Grane had been enchanted. Casales smoked cigarillos and had a dark, sensuous voice well suited to her punchy one-liners and frequent sexual allusions. But now on the telephone she sounded confused and sometimes unaccountably lost the thread of what she was saying.

  —

  Blomkvist did not really know what to expect, a fashionable young man, presumably, some cool dude. But the fellow who had arrived looked like a tramp, short and with torn jeans and long, dark, unwashed hair, something slightly sleepy and shifty in his eyes. He was maybe twenty-five, perhaps younger, had bad skin, and a rather ugly mouth sore. Linus Brandell did not look like someone who was sitting on a major scoop.

  “Linus Brandell, I presume.”

  “That’s right. Sorry I’m late. Happened to bump into a girl I knew. We were in the same class in ninth grade, and she—”

  “Let’s get this over with,” Blomkvist interrupted him, and led the way to a table towards the back of the pub.

  When Amir appeared, smiling discreetly, they ordered two pints of Guinness and then sat quietly for a few seconds. Blomkvist could not understand why he felt so irritated. It was not like him; perhaps the whole drama with Serner was getting to him after all. He smiled at Arne and his gang, all of whom were studying them keenly.

  “I’ll come straight to the point,” Brandell said.

  “That sounds good.”

  “Do you know Supercraft?”

  Blomkvist did not know much about computer games, but even he had heard of Supercraft.

  “By name, yes.”

  “No more than that?”

  “No.”

  “In that case you won’t know that what makes this game different, or at least so special, is that it has a particular AI function: it allows you to communicate with a player about war strategy without being really sure, at least to begin with, whether you’re talking to a real person or a digital creation.”

  “You don’t say,” Blomkvist said. Nothing interested him less than the finer points of a damn game.

  “It’s a minor revolution in the industry and I was actually involved in developing it,” Brandell said.

  “Congratulations. In that case you must have made a killing.”

  “That’s just it.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The technology was stolen from us and now Truegames is making billions while we don’t get a single öre.”

  Blomkvist had heard this line before. He had even spoken to an old lady who claimed that it was actually she who had written the Harry Potter books and that J. K. Rowling had stolen everything by telepathy.

  “So how did it happen?” he said.

  “We were hacked.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “It’s been established by experts at the National Defence Radio Establishment. I can give you a name there if you want, and also by a…”

  Brandell hesitated.

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing. But even the Security Police were involved, you can talk to Gabriella Grane there. She’s an analyst and I think she’ll back me up. She mentioned the incident in a report which she published last year. I have the reference number here…”

  “In other words, this isn’t news,” Blomkvist interrupted.

  “No, not in that sense. New Technology and Computer Sweden wrote about it. But since Frans didn’t want to talk and on a couple of occasions even denied that there had been any breach at all, the story never went very far.”

  “But it’s still old news.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “So why should I be listening to you, Linus?”

  “Because now Frans seems to have understood what happened. I think he’s sitting on pure dynamite. He’s become completely manic about security. Only uses hyper-encryption for his phones and e-mail and he’s just got a new burglar alarm with cameras and sensors and all that crap. I think you should talk to him. That’s why I got in touch with you. A guy like you could get him to open up. He doesn’t listen to me.”

  “So you order me down here because it seems as if someone called Frans may be sitting on some dynamite.”

  “Not someone called Frans, Blomkvist, it’s none other than Frans Balder, didn’t I say that? I was one of his assistants.”

  Blomkvist searched his memory: the only Balder he could think of was Hanna Balder, the actress, whatever might have become of her.

  “Who’s he?” he said.

  The look he got was so full of contempt that he was taken aback.

  “Where’ve you been living, Mars? Frans Balder is a legend. A household name.”

  “Really?”

  “Christ, yes!” Brandell said. “Google him and you’ll see. He became a professor of computer sciences at just twenty-seven and for two decades he’s been a leading authority on research in artificial intelligence. There’s hardly anyone who’s as far advanced in the development of quantum computing and neural networks. He has an amazingly cool, back-to-front brain. Thinks along completely unorthodox, groundbreaking lines and as you can probably imagine the computer industry’s been chasing him for years. But for a long time Balder refused to let himself be recruited. He wanted to work alone. Well, not altogether alone, he’s always had assistants he’s driven into the ground. He wants results, and he’s always saying: ‘Nothing is impossible. Our job is to push back the frontiers, blah blah blah.’ But people listen to him. They’ll do anything for him. They’ll just about die for him. To us nerds he is God Almighty.”

  “I can hear that.”

  “But don’t think that I’m some starstruck admirer, not at all. There’s a price to be paid, I know that better than anyone. You can do great things with him, but you can also go to pieces. Balder isn’t even allowed to look after his own son. He messed up in some unforgivable way. There are a lot of different stories, assistants who’ve hit the wall and wrecked their lives and God knows what. But although he’s always been obsessive he’s never behaved like this before. I just know he’s onto something big.”

  “You just know that.”

  “You’ve got to understand, he’s not normally a paranoid person. Quite the opposite. He’s never been anywhere near paranoid enough, given the level of the things he’s been dealing with. But now he’s locked himself into his house and hardly goes out. He seems afraid and he really doesn’t do scared.”

  “And he was working on computer games?” Blomkvist said, without hiding his scepticism.

  “Well…since he knew we were all gaming freaks he probably thought we should get to work on something that we liked. But his AI programme was also right for that business. It was a perfect testing environment and we got fantastic results. We broke new ground. It was just…”

  “Get to the point, Linus.”

  “Frans and his lawyers wrote a patent application for the most innovative parts of the technology, and that’s when the first shock came. A Russian engineer at Truegames had thrown together an application just before, which blocked our patent. It can hardly
have been a coincidence. But that didn’t really matter. The patent was only a paper tiger. The interesting thing was how the hell they had managed to find out about what we’d been doing. Since we were all devoted to Frans even to the point of death, there was only one possibility: we must have been hacked, in spite of all our security measures.”

  “Is that when you got in touch with Säpo and the National Defence Radio Establishment?”

  “Not at first. Balder is not too keen on people who wear ties and work from nine to five. He prefers obsessive idiots who are glued to their computers all night long, so instead he got in touch with some weirdo hacker he had met somewhere and she said straightaway that we’d had a breach. Not that she seemed particularly credible. I wouldn’t have hired her, if you see what I mean, and perhaps she was just talking drivel. But her main conclusions were nevertheless subsequently borne out by people at the NDRE.”

  “But no-one knew who had hacked you?”

  “No, no, trying to trace hacker breaches is often a complete waste of time. But they must have been professionals. We had done a lot of work on our IT security.”

  “And now you suspect that Balder may have found out something more about it?”

  “Definitely. Otherwise he wouldn’t be behaving so strangely. I’m convinced he got wind of something at Solifon.”

  “Is that where he worked?”

  “Yes, oddly enough. As I told you before, Balder had previously refused to let himself be tied up by the big computer giants. No-one has ever banged on as much as he did about being an outsider, about the importance of being independent and not being a slave to commercial forces. But out of the blue, as we stood there with our trousers down and our technology stolen, he suddenly accepted an offer from Solifon, of all companies. Nobody could understand it. OK, they were offering a megasalary, free rein, and all of that crap, like: Do whatever the hell you want, just work for us, and that probably sounded cool. It would definitely have been cool for anyone who wasn’t Frans Balder. But he’d had any number of offers like that from Google, Apple, and all the others. Why was this suddenly so interesting? He never explained. He just packed his stuff and disappeared and from what I’ve heard it went swimmingly at first. Balder continued to develop our technology and I think Solifon’s owner, Nicolas Grant, was beginning to fantasize about revenues in the billions. There was great excitement. But then something happened.”