The Girl in the Spider's Web

by David Lagercrantz

  “In the olden days in situations like that you would call a priest.”

  “So now you call a journalist. Well, it’s pure speculation. We only know what Balder said on Blomkvist’s voicemail. Apart from that we have no idea what he was planning to tell him. Blomkvist says he doesn’t know either, and I believe him. But I seem to be pretty much the only one who does. Ekström, who’s being a massive nuisance by the way, is convinced Blomkvist is holding back things which he plans to publish in his magazine. I find that very hard to believe. Blomkvist is a tricky bugger, we all know that. But he isn’t someone who will knowingly, deliberately sabotage a police investigation.”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Ekström is coming on strong and saying that Blomkvist should be arrested for perjury and obstruction and God knows what else.”

  “That’s not going to do any good.”

  “No, and bearing in mind what Blomkvist is capable of I think we’re better off staying on good terms with him.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to talk to him again.”

  “I agree.”

  “And this thing with Lasse Westman?”

  “We’ve just spoken to him, and it’s not an edifying story. Westman had been to the Artists’ Bar and the Theatre Grill and the Opera Bar and Riche, you get the idea, and was ranting and raving about Balder and the boy for hours on end. He drove his friends crazy. The more Westman drank and the more money he blew, the more fixated he became.”

  “Why was this important to him?”

  “Partly it was a hang-up. You get that with alcoholics. I remember it from an old uncle. Every time he got loaded, he got something fixed in his mind. But obviously there’s more to it than that. At first Westman went on about the custody ruling, and if he had been a different person one might believe that he really was concerned for the boy. But in this case…I suppose you know that Westman has a conviction for assault.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “He had a relationship some years ago with some fashion blogger, Renata Kapusinski. He beat the crap out of her. I think he even bit her rather badly in the cheek. Also, Balder had intended to report him. He never sent in the paperwork—perhaps because of the legal position he found himself in—but it clearly suggests that he suspected Westman of being violent towards his son as well.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Balder had noticed unexplained bruises on the boy’s body—and in this he’s backed up by a psychologist from the Centre for Autism. So it was…”

  “…probably not love and concern which drove Westman out to Saltsjöbaden.”

  “More likely it was money. After Balder took back his son, he had stopped or at least reduced the child support he had agreed to pay.”

  “Westman didn’t try to report him for that?”

  “He probably didn’t dare to, in the circumstances.”

  “What else does the custody ruling say?” Bublanski said after a pause.

  “That Balder was a useless father.”

  “Was he?”

  “He certainly wasn’t evil, like Westman. But there’d been an incident. After the divorce, Balder had his son every other weekend, and at that time he was living in an apartment in Östermalm with books from floor to ceiling. One of those weekends, when August was six, he was in the sitting room—with Balder glued to his computer in the next room as usual. We don’t know exactly what happened. But there was a small stepladder propped against one of the bookshelves. August climbed it and probably took hold of some of the books higher up and fell and broke his elbow. He knocked himself unconscious, but Balder didn’t hear anything. He just kept working and only after several hours did he discover August lying on the floor next to those books, moaning. At that he became hysterical and drove the boy to the emergency room.”

  “And he lost custody altogether?”

  “Not only that. He was declared emotionally immature and incapable of taking care of his child. He was not allowed to be alone with August. But frankly I don’t think much of that ruling.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it was an uncontested hearing. The ex-wife’s lawyer went at it hammer and tongs, while Balder grovelled and said he was useless and irresponsible and unfit to live and God knows what. What the tribunal wrote was malicious and tendentious, to my mind: to the effect that Balder had never been able to connect with other people and had always sought refuge with machines. Now that I’ve had time to look into his life a little, I’m not that impressed by how it was dealt with. His guilt-laden tirades and self-criticism were taken as gospel by the tribunal. At any rate Balder was extremely cooperative. As I said, he agreed to pay a large amount of child support, forty thousand a month, I believe, plus a one-off payment of nine hundred thousand kronor for unforeseen expenses. Not long after that he took himself off to America.”

  “But then he came back.”

  “Yes, and there were a number of reasons for that. He’d had his technology stolen, and maybe he identified who had done it. He found himself in a serious dispute with his employer. But I think it had also to do with his son. The woman from the Centre for Autism I mentioned, she’d been very optimistic about the boy’s development at an early stage. But then nothing turned out as she’d hoped. She also received reports that Hanna Balder and Westman had failed to live up to their responsibilities when it came to his schooling. It had been agreed that August would be taught at home, but the special-needs teachers seem to have been played off against each other. Probably the money for his education was misappropriated and fake teachers’ names used, all sorts of crap like that. But that’s an altogether different story which somebody will have to look into at some point.”

  “You were talking about the woman from the Centre for Autism.”

  “That’s right. She smelled a rat and called Hanna and Westman and was informed that everything was fine. But she had a feeling that wasn’t true. So against normal practice she made an unannounced home visit and, when they finally let her in, she could tell that the boy was not doing well, that his development had stagnated. She also saw those bruises. She rang Balder in San Francisco, had a long conversation with him, and soon after that he moved back and took his son with him to his new house in Saltsjöbaden, disregarding the custody order.”

  “How did he manage that, seeing how keen Westman was to get the child support?”

  “Good question. According to Westman, Balder more or less kidnapped the boy. But Hanna has a different version of the story. She says that Frans turned up and seemed to have changed, so she let him take August. She even thought that the boy would be better off with his father.”

  “And Westman?”

  “According to her, Westman was drunk and had just landed a big part in a new TV production, and was feeling cocky and over-confident. So he agreed to it. However much he may have gone on about the boy’s welfare, I think he was glad to be rid of him.”

  “But then?”

  “Then he regretted it, and on top of everything else he was sacked from the series because he couldn’t stay sober. He suddenly wanted to have August back, or not so much him, of course…”

  “The child support.”

  “Exactly, and that was confirmed by his drinking pals. When Westman’s credit card was rejected during the course of the evening, he really started ranting and raving about the boy. He bummed five hundred kronor off a young woman in the bar to pay for a taxi to Saltsjöbaden in the middle of the night.”

  Bublanski was lost in his thoughts for a while and gazed once again at the photograph of Modig’s son.

  “What a mess,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “Under normal circumstances we would be close to solving this one. We’d find our motive somewhere in that custody battle. But these guys who hack alarm systems and look like ninja warriors, they don’t fit the picture.”

  “No.”

  “There’s something else I’m wondering about.”

  “What
’s that?”

  “If August can’t read, then what was he doing trying to reach those books?”

  —

  Blomkvist was sitting opposite Farah Sharif at her kitchen table with a cup of tea, looking out at Tantolunden. Even though he knew it was a sign of weakness, he wished he did not have a story to write. He wished he could just sit there without having to press her for information.

  She did not look as if talking would do her much good. Her whole face had collapsed and the intense dark eyes, which had looked straight through him at the front door, now seemed disoriented. Sometimes she muttered Balder’s name like a mantra or an incantation. Maybe she had loved him. Farah was fifty-two years old and a very attractive woman, not beautiful in a conventional way but with a regal bearing. He had definitely loved her.

  “Tell me, what was he like,” Blomkvist said.

  “Frans?”

  “Yes.”

  “A paradox.”

  “In what way?”

  “In all sorts of ways. But mainly because he worked so hard on the one thing which worried him more than anything else. Maybe a bit like Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. He was engrossed in something he believed could be our ruin.”

  “Now you’ve lost me.”

  “Frans wanted to replicate biological evolution on a digital level. He was working on self-teaching algorithms—the idea is they can enhance themselves through trial and error. He also contributed to the development of quantum computers, as people call them, which Google, Solifon, and the NSA are working on. His objective was to achieve AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Something with the intelligence of a human being, but the speed and precision of a computer. If a thing like that could be created, it would give us enormous advantages within numerous fields.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “There is an extraordinary amount of research going on in this area, and even though most scientists aren’t specifically aiming for AGI, competition is driving us in that direction. Nobody can afford not to create applications which are as intelligent as possible. Nobody can afford to put the brake on development. Just think of what we have achieved so far. Just think back to what you had in your mobile five years ago compared to what’s in there today.”

  “True.”

  “Before he became so secretive, Frans told me he estimated that we could get to AGI within thirty or forty years. That may sound ambitious, but for my part I wonder if he wasn’t being too conservative. The capacity of computers doubles every eighteen months, and the human brain is bad at grasping that kind of exponential growth. It’s like the grain of rice on the chessboard, you know? You put one grain of rice on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth.”

  “And soon the grains of rice have flooded the world.”

  “The pace of growth goes on increasing and in the end it escapes our control. The interesting thing isn’t actually when we reach AGI, but what happens after that. Just a few days after we’ve reached AGI, we’ll have ASI—Artificial Super Intelligence—used to describe something more intelligent than we are. After that it’ll just get quicker and quicker. Computers will start enhancing themselves at an accelerating pace, perhaps by a factor of ten, and become a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand times cleverer than we are. What happens then?”

  “I dread to think.”

  “Quite. Intelligence in itself is not predictable. We don’t know where human intelligence will take us. We know even less what will happen with a superintelligence.”

  “In the worst case we’ll be no more interesting to the computer than little white mice,” Blomkvist said, thinking of what he had written to Salander.

  “In the worst case? We share 90 percent of our DNA with mice, and we’re assumed to be about one hundred times as intelligent. Only one hundred times. Here’s something completely new, not subject to these kinds of limitations, according to mathematical models. And it can become perhaps a million times more intelligent. Can you imagine?”

  “I’m certainly trying to,” Blomkvist said with a careful smile.

  “I mean, how do you think a computer would feel when it wakes up to find itself captured and controlled by primitive little creatures like us. Why would it put up with that?” she said. “Why on earth should it show us any consideration, still less let us dig around in its entrails in order to shut down the process? We risk being confronted by an explosion of intelligence, a technological singularity, as Vernor Vinge put it. Everything that happens after that lies beyond our event horizon.”

  “So the very instant we create a superintelligence we lose control, is that right?”

  “The risk is that everything we know about the world will cease to be relevant, and it’ll be the end of human existence.”

  “You are joking.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s a very real question. There are thousands of people all over the world working to prevent a development like this. Many are optimists, or even foresee some kind of utopia. There’s talk of friendly ASI, superintelligences which are programmed from the start to do nothing but help us. The idea is something along the lines of what Asimov envisioned in his book I, Robot: built-in laws which forbid the machines to harm us. Innovator and author Ray Kurzweil has visions of a wonderful world in which nanotechnology allows us to integrate ourselves with computers, and share our future with them. But there are no guarantees. Laws can be repealed. The intent of initial programming can be changed and it’s fatally easy to make anthropomorphic mistakes: to ascribe human characteristics to machines and misunderstand what drives them, inherently. Frans was obsessed with these questions and, as I said, he was of two minds. He both longed for intelligent computers and he also worried about them.”

  “He couldn’t help but build his monsters.”

  “A bit like that, though that’s putting it drastically.”

  “How far had he got?”

  “Further, I think, than anyone could imagine, and that may have been yet another reason why he was so secretive about his work at Solifon. He was afraid his programme would end up in the wrong hands. He was even afraid the programme would come into contact with the Internet and merge with it. He called it August, after his son.”

  “And where is it now?”

  “He never went anywhere without it. It must have been right by the bed when he was shot. But the terrible thing is that the police say there was no computer there.”

  “I didn’t see one either. But then my focus was elsewhere.”

  “It must have been dreadful.”

  “Perhaps you heard that I also saw the man who killed him,” Blomkvist said. “He was carrying a backpack.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. But with a bit of luck the computer will turn up somewhere in the house.”

  “Let’s hope so. Do you have any idea who stole his technology the first time around?”

  “Yes, I do, as a matter of fact.”

  “I’m very interested.”

  “I can see that. But the sad thing is that I have some personal responsibility for this mess. Frans was working himself to death, you see, and I was worried he would burn out. That was about the time he had lost custody of August.”

  “When was that?”

  “Two years ago. He was utterly worn out. He wasn’t sleeping, and he went around blaming himself, yet he was incapable of dropping his research. He threw himself into it as if it were all he had left in life, and so I arranged for him to get some assistants who could take some of the load. I let him have my best students. I knew that none of them was a model of probity, but they were ambitious and gifted, and their admiration for Frans was boundless. Everything looked promising. But then…”

  “His technology was stolen.”

  “He had clear proof of that when the application from Truegames was submitted to the U.S. Patent Office in August last year. Every unique aspect of his technology had been duplicated and
written down there. It was obvious. At first they all suspected their computers had been hacked, but I was sceptical from the start—I knew how sophisticated Frans’s encryption was. But since there was no other plausible explanation, that was the initial assumption, and for a while maybe Frans believed it himself. That was nonsense, of course.”

  “What are you saying?” Blomkvist burst out. “Surely the data breach was confirmed by experts.”

  “Yes, by some idiot show-off at the NDRE. But that was just Frans’s way of protecting his boys, or it could have been more than that. I suspect he also wanted to play detective, although heaven knows how he could be so stupid. You see…” Farah took a deep breath. “I learned all this only a few weeks ago. Frans and little August were here for dinner and I sensed at once that he had something important to tell me. It was hanging in the air. After a couple of glasses he asked me to put away my mobile and began to speak in a whisper. I have to admit that at first I was irritated. He was going on again about his young hacker genius.”

  “Hacker genius?” Blomkvist said, trying to sound neutral.

  “A girl he spoke about so much that it was doing my head in. I won’t bore you with the full story, but she’d turned up out of the blue at one of his lectures and practically lectured him on the concept of singularity. She impressed Frans, and he started to open up to her, it’s understandable. A mega-nerd like Frans can’t have found all that many people he could talk to on his own level, and when he realized that the girl was also a hacker he asked her to take a look at their computers. At the time they had all the equipment at the home of one of the assistants.”

  All Blomkvist said was “Linus Brandell.”

  “Yes,” Farah said. “The girl came round to his place in Östermalm and threw him out. Then she got to work on the computers. She couldn’t find any sign of a breach, but she didn’t leave it at that. She had a list of Frans’s assistants and hacked them all from Linus’s computer. It didn’t take long for her to realize that one of them had sold him out to none other than Solifon.”