The Girl in the Spider's Web

by David Lagercrantz

 

  There were some images of Bogdanov online. They showed him wearing pin-striped suits which fit perfectly but still managed to look wrong on him, as if he had stolen them on the way to the photographer’s. Bogdanov had long, lank hair, a pockmarked face, and large rings under his eyes, and you could just about make out some amateurish tattoos beneath his shirt cuffs. His look was dark, intense, and piercing. He was tall but cannot have weighed more than 130 pounds.

  He looked like an old jailbird, but most striking: there was something about his body language which Blomkvist recognized from the images on the surveillance cameras at Balder’s place. The man gave the same tattered, rough-edged impression.

  There were also interviews he had given as a businessman in Berlin in which he vouchsafed that he had been born more or less on the streets. “I was doomed to end up dead in an alleyway with a needle stuck in my arm. But I managed to pull myself out of the muck. I’m intelligent and I’m one hell of a fighter,” he said. There was nothing in the details of his life to contradict these claims, save for the suspicion that he may not have been raised exclusively through his own efforts. There were clues to suggest he had been given a helping hand by powerful people who had spotted his talent. In a German technology magazine, a security chief at the Horst credit institution was quoted as saying, “Bogdanov has magic in his eyes. He can detect vulnerabilities in security systems like no-one else. He’s a genius.”

  So Bogdanov was a star hacker, although the official version had him acting only as a “white hat,” someone who served the good, legal side, who helped companies identify flaws in their IT security in exchange for decent compensation. There was nothing in the least suspicious about his company, Outcast Security. The board members were all respectable, well-educated people. But Blomkvist did not leave it at that. He and Zander scrutinized every individual who had had any contact with the company, even partners of partners, and they noticed that somebody called Orlov had been a deputy board member only for a short time, which seemed strange. Vladimir Orlov was no IT man, but a minor player in the construction sector. He had once been a promising heavyweight boxer in the Crimea and, judging by the few pictures Blomkvist found online, he looked ravaged and brutal.

  There were rumours that he had been convicted of assault and procuring. He had been married twice—both wives were dead, and Blomkvist had not been able to find a cause of death in either case. But the most interesting discovery he made was that the man had served as a substitute board member of a company—minor and long since defunct—by the name of Bodin Construction & Export, which had dealt in “sales of construction materials.”

  The owner of the company had been Karl Axel Bodin, the alias of Alexander Zalachenko, a name that revived memories of the evil conspiracy which became the subject of Millennium’s greatest scoop. Zalachenko who was Salander’s father, and her dark shadow, the black heart behind her throbbing determination to exact revenge.

  Was it a coincidence that his name cropped up? Blomkvist knew better than anyone that if you dig deep enough into a story, you will always find links. Life is constantly treating us to illusory connections. It was just that when it came to Lisbeth Salander, he stopped believing in coincidence.

  If she broke a surgeon’s fingers or delved into the theft of some advanced AI technology, you could be sure that she had not only thought it through to the last particle, she would also have a reason. Salander was not one to forget an injustice. She retaliated and she righted wrongs. Could her involvement in this story be connected to her own background? It was by no means inconceivable.

  Blomkvist looked up from his computer and glanced at Zander. Zander nodded back at him. The faint smell of something cooking was coming from the kitchen. Thudding rock music could be heard from Götgatan. Outside the storm was howling, and the sky was still dark and wild. Blomkvist went into the encrypted link out of habit, not expecting to find anything. But then his face lit up. He even let out a small whoop of joy.

  It said:

 

  He wrote:

 

  Then he could not resist adding:

 

  She answered at once:

 

  —

  OK was an exaggeration. Salander was better, but still in bad shape. For half of yesterday, in her apartment, she had been barely conscious and only managed with the greatest difficulty to drag herself out of bed to see that August had something to eat and drink and make sure he had pencils, crayons, and paper. But as she approached him now she could see even from a distance that he had drawn nothing.

  There was paper scattered all over the coffee table in front of him, but no drawings. Instead she saw rows of scribbles. More absentmindedly than out of curiosity she tried to make out what they were—he had written numbers, endless series of numbers, and even if at first they made no sense to her, she was intrigued. Suddenly she gave a whistle.

  “Oh my God,” she muttered.

  They were staggeringly large numbers, which formed a familiar pattern alongside the numbers next to them. As she looked through the papers and came across the simple sequence 641, 647, 653, and 659, there was no longer any doubt: they were sexy prime quadruplets, sexy in the sense that they differed from each other by six.

  There were also twin primes, and every other imaginable combination of prime numbers. She could not help but smile. “Wicked.”

  But August neither responded nor looked up at her. He just kept kneeling by the coffee table, as if he wanted nothing more than to go on writing his numbers. It occurred to her that she had read something about savants and prime numbers, but she put it out of her mind. She was far too unwell for any kind of advanced thinking. Instead she went into the bathroom and took two more Vibramycin antibiotics which had been lying around in her apartment for years.

  She packed her pistol and her computer, a few changes of clothes, and to be on the safe side she put on a wig and a pair of dark glasses. When she was ready she asked the boy to get up. He did not respond, just held his pencil in a tight grip. For a moment she stood in front of him, stumped. Then she said sternly, “Get up!,” and he did.

  They put on their outer layers, took the lift down to the garage, and set off in her BMW for the safe house on Ingarö. Her left shoulder was tightly strapped and it ached, so she steered with her right hand. The top of her chest was hurting, she had a fever and had to stop a couple of times at the side of the road to rest. When finally they got to the beach and the jetty by Stora Barnvik on Ingarö, and followed the directions to climb the wooden stairs alongside the slope to the house, she collapsed exhausted on the first bed she saw. She was shivering and freezing cold.

  Soon after, breathing laboriously, she got up and sat at the kitchen table with her laptop, trying once more to crack the file she had downloaded from the NSA. But she did not even come close. August sat next to her, looking stiffly at the pile of paper and crayons Berger had left for him, no longer interested in prime numbers, still less in drawing pictures. Perhaps he was in shock.

  —

  The man who called himself Jan Holtser was sitting in a room at the Clarion Hotel Arlanda talking on the telephone with his daughter. As he had expected, she did not believe him.

  “Are you scared of me?” she said. “Are you afraid I’m going to cross-examine you?”

  “No, Olga, absolutely not,” he said. “It’s just that…”

  He could not find the words. He knew Olga could tell he was hiding something, and ended the conversation sooner than he wanted to. Bogdanov was sitting next to him on the hotel bed, swearing. He had been through Balder’s computer at least a hundred times and found “fuck all,” as he put it. “Not a single fucking thing!”

  “I stole a computer with nothing o
n it,” Holtser said.

  “Right.”

  “So what was the professor using it for?”

  “For something very important, clearly. I can see that a large file, presumably connected to other computers, was deleted recently. But I can’t recover it. He knew his stuff, that guy.”

  “Useless,” Holtser said.

  “Completely fucking useless.”

  “And the Blackphone?”

  “There are a couple of calls I haven’t been able to trace, presumably from the Swedish security services or the NDRE. But there’s something bothering me much more.”

  “What?”

  “A long conversation the professor had just before you stormed in—he was talking to someone at the MIRI, Machine Intelligence Research Institute.”

  “What’s the problem with that?”

  “The timing. I get the feeling he was having some sort of crisis. Also this Institute works to ensure that intelligent computers don’t become a threat to mankind—it doesn’t look good. Balder could have given the MIRI his research or…”

  “Or what?”

  “Or he could have spilled the beans on us, at least what he knew.”

  “That would be bad.”

  Bogdanov nodded and Holtser swore quietly. Nothing had gone as planned and neither of them was used to failing. But here were two major mistakes in a row, and all because of a child, a retarded child.

  That was bad enough. But the worst of it was that Kira was on her way, unhinged on top of everything else. Neither of them was used to that either. On the contrary, they had grown accustomed to her cool elegance, the air of invincibility it gave their operations. Now she was furious, completely off the wall, screaming at them that they were useless, incompetent cretins. It was not so much that those shots may have missed Balder’s son. It was because of the woman who had appeared out of nowhere and rescued the boy. That woman sent Kira around the bend.

  When Holtser had begun to describe her—the little he had seen—Kira bombarded him with questions. Every answer he gave was wrong, according to Kira. She went berserk, yelling that they should have killed her and that this was typical of them, brainless, useless. Neither of them could make sense of her violent reaction. They had never heard her yell like that before.

  In fact there was a lot they did not know about her. Holtser would never forget his evening with her in a suite at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen—they had had sex for the third or fourth time, and afterwards had been lying in bed drinking champagne and chatting about his wars and his murders, as they so often did. While stroking her arm he had discovered three scars side by side on her wrist.

  “How did you get those, gorgeous?” he had said, and got a look of pure loathing in return.

  He had never been allowed to sleep with her again. He took it to be a punishment for having asked. Kira looked after the group and gave them a lot of money. But neither he nor Bogdanov, nor anyone else, was allowed to ask about her past. That was one of the unspoken rules and none of them would even dream of trying. For better or for worse she was their benefactress, mostly for better, they thought, and they went along with her whims, living in constant uncertainty as to whether she would be affectionate or cold, or even give them a brutal, stinging slap.

  Bogdanov closed the computer and took a swallow of his drink. They were trying to limit their drinking, so that Kira would not use that against them. But it was nearly impossible. The frustration and adrenalin drove them to it. Holtser fingered his mobile nervously.

  “Didn’t Olga believe you?” Bogdanov said.

  “Not a word. Soon she’ll see a child’s drawing of me on every billboard.”

  “I don’t buy that drawing thing. Probably wishful thinking on the part of the police.”

  “So we’re supposed to kill a child for no reason?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. Shouldn’t Kira be here by now?”

  “Any minute.”

  “Who do you think it was?”

  “Who?”

  “The girl who appeared from nowhere.”

  “No idea,” Holtser said. “Not sure Kira knows either. But she’s worried about something.”

  “We’ll probably end up having to kill them both.”

  “That might be the least of it.”

  —

  August was not feeling well. That was obvious. Red patches flared on his throat and he was clenching his fists. Salander, sitting next to him at the round table, working on her RSA encryption, was afraid he was on the verge of some sort of fit. But August only picked up a crayon, a black one.

  At the same moment a gust of wind shook the large windowpanes in front of them. August hesitated and moved his hand back and forth across the table. But then he started to draw, a line here, a line there, followed by some small circles, buttons, Salander thought, then a hand, details of a chin, an unbuttoned shirt front. It began to go more quickly and the tension in the boy’s back and shoulders subsided—as if a wound had burst open and begun to heal.

  There was a searing, tortured look in his eyes, and every now and then he shivered. But there was no doubt that something within him had eased. He picked up some new crayons and started to draw an oak-coloured floor, on which appeared pieces of a puzzle that seemed to represent a glittering town at night-time. It was clear at this stage that the drawing would be anything but a pleasant one.

  The hand and the unbuttoned shirt front became part of a large man with a protruding belly. The man was standing, bent like a jackknife, beating a small person on the floor, a person who was not in the drawing for the simple reason that he was observing the scene, and on the receiving end of the blows.

  It was an ugly scene, no doubt about that. But even though the picture revealed an assailant, it did not seem to have anything to do with the murder. Right in the middle, at the epicentre of the drawing, a furious, sweaty face appeared, every foul and bitter furrow captured with precision. Salander recognized it. She rarely watched TV or went to the cinema, but she knew it was the face of the actor Lasse Westman, August’s mother’s partner. She leaned forward to the boy and said, with a holy, quivering rage:

  “We’ll never let him do that to you again. Never.”

  CHAPTER 21

  NOVEMBER 23

  Casales knew at once that something was wrong when she saw Commander Ingram’s lanky figure approach Needham’s desk. You could tell from his hesitant manner that the news was not good.

  Ingram usually had a malicious grin on his face when he stuck a knife in someone’s back, but with Needham it was different. Even the most senior bosses were scared of Needham—he would raise all hell if anyone tried to mess with him. Ingram did not like scenes, still less humiliation, and that was what awaited him if he picked a fight with Needham.

  While Needham was brash and explosive, Ingram was a refined upper-class type with spindly legs and an affected manner. Ingram was a serious power player and had influence where it mattered, be it in Washington or in the world of business. As a member of the NSA management, he ranked just below Admiral Charles O’Connor. He might be quick to smile and adept at handing out compliments, but his smile never reached his eyes.

  He had leverage over people and was, among other things, in charge of “monitoring strategic technologies”—more cynically known as industrial espionage, that part of the NSA which gives the American tech industry a helping hand in global competition. He was feared as few others were.

  But now as he stood in front of Needham in his fancy suit, his body seemed to shrink even from one hundred feet away. Casales knew exactly what was about to happen: Needham was on the brink of exploding. His pale, exhausted face was going red. Without waiting he got to his feet, his back crooked and bent, his belly sticking out, and roared in a furious voice.

  “You sleazy bastard!”

  No-one but Needham would call Jonny Ingram a “sleazy bastard,” and Casales loved him for it.

  —

  August started on a new drawin
g.

  He sketched a few lines. He was pressing so hard on the paper that the black crayon broke and, just like the last time, he drew rapidly, one detail here and another one there, disparate bits which ultimately came together and formed a whole. It was the same room, but there was a different puzzle on the floor, easier to make out: it represented a red sports car racing by a sea of shouting spectators in a stand. Above the puzzle not one but two men could be seen standing.

  One of them was Westman again. This time he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts and he had bloodshot, squinting eyes. He looked unsteady and drunk, but no less furious. He was drooling. Yet he was not the most frightening figure in the drawing. That was the other man, whose watery eyes shone with pure sadism. He too was unshaven and drunk, and he had thin, almost nonexistent lips. He seemed to be kicking August, although again the boy could not be seen in the picture, his very absence making him extremely present.

  “Who’s the other one?” Salander said.

  August said nothing. But his shoulders shook, and his legs twisted into a knot under the table.

  “Who’s the other one?” Salander said again, in a more forceful tone, and August wrote on the drawing in a shaky, childish hand:

  R O G E R

  Roger—the name meant nothing to Salander.

  —

  A couple of hours later in Fort Meade, once his hacker boys had cleaned up after themselves and shuffled off, Needham walked over to Casales. The odd thing was, he no longer looked at all angry or upset. He was radiant with defiance and carrying a notebook. His shirt was disheveled.

  “Hey, bud,” she said. “Tell me, what’s going on?”