“I got some vacation time,” he said. “I’m off to Stockholm.”
“Of all places. Isn’t it cold this time of year?”
“Freezing, by all accounts.”
“So you’re not really going there on vacation.”
“Strictly between us?”
“Go on.”
“Ingram ordered us to halt our investigation. The hacker goes free, and we’re supposed to be satisfied with stopping up a few leaks. Then the whole thing gets swept under the carpet.”
“How the hell can he lay down something like that?”
“They don’t want to awaken any sleeping dogs, he says, and run the risk of anyone finding out about the attack. It would be devastating if it ever got out. Just think of all the malicious glee, and all the people whose heads would roll, starting with yours truly.”
“He threatened you?”
“Did he ever! Went on about how I would be publicly humiliated, even sued.”
“You don’t seem worried.”
“I’m going to break him.”
“How? Our glamour boy has powerful connections everywhere, you know that.”
“I have a few of my own. Besides, Ingram isn’t the only one with dirt on people. That damn hacker was gracious enough to link and match our computer files and show us some of our own dirty laundry.”
“That’s ironic, isn’t it?”
“It takes a crook to know one. At first the data didn’t look all that spectacular, not compared to the other stuff we’re doing. But when we started to really get into it…”
“Yes?”
“It turned out to be dynamite.”
“In what way?”
“Ingram’s closest colleagues not only collect trade secrets to help our own major companies. Sometimes they also sell the information for a lot of money. And that money, Alona, doesn’t always find its way into the coffers of the organization…”
“But into their own pockets.”
“Exactly. I already have enough evidence on that to put two of our top industrial espionage executives behind bars.”
“Jesus.”
“Unfortunately it’s less straightforward with Ingram. I’m convinced he’s the brains behind the whole thing. Otherwise all of this doesn’t add up. But I don’t have a smoking gun, not yet, which makes the whole operation risky. There’s always a chance—though I wouldn’t bet on it—that the file the hacker downloaded has something specific on him. But it’s impossible to crack—a goddamn RSA encryption.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Tighten the net. Show the world that our own co-workers are in cahoots with criminal organizations.”
“Like the Spiders.”
“Like the Spiders. And plenty of other bad guys. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were involved in the killing of your professor in Stockholm. They had a clear interest in seeing him dead.”
“You’ve got to be joking.”
“I’m completely serious. Your professor knew things that could have blown up in their faces.”
“Holy shit. And you’re off to Stockholm like some private detective to investigate?”
“Not like a private detective, Alona. I’m going to be official, and while I’m there I’m going to give our hacker such a pummelling she won’t be able to stand.”
“Wait, Ed. Did you say she?”
“You better believe it. Our hacker’s a she!”
—
August’s drawings took Salander back in time. She thought of that fist beating rhythmically and relentlessly on the mattress. She remembered the thuds and the grunting and the crying from inside the bedroom next door. She remembered the times at Lundagatan when her comics and fantasies of revenge were her only refuge.
But she shook off the memories. She changed the dressing on her shoulder. Then she checked her pistol, made sure that it was loaded. She went onto the PGP link. Andrei Zander was asking how they were, and she gave a short reply.
Outside, the storm was shaking the trees and bushes. She helped herself to some whiskey and a piece of chocolate, then went out onto the terrace and from there to the rock slope where she carefully reconnoitred the terrain, noticing a small cleft some way down. She counted her steps and memorized the lay of the land.
By the time she got back, August had made another drawing of Westman and the Roger person. She supposed he needed to get it out of his system. But still he had not drawn anything from the night of the murder. Perhaps the experience was blocked in his mind.
Salander was overcome by a feeling of time running away from them and she cast a worried look at August. For a minute or so she focused on the mind-boggling numbers he had put down on paper. She studied their structure until suddenly she spotted a sequence which did not fit in with the others.
It was relatively short: 2305843008139952128. She got it immediately. It was not a prime number, it was—and here her spirits lifted—a number which, according to a perfect harmony, is made up of the sum of all its positive divisors. It was, in other words, a perfect number, just as 6 is because it can be divided evenly by 3, 2, and 1, and 3 + 2 + 1 happen to add up to 6. She smiled. And then she had an exhilarating thought.
—
“Now you’re going to have to explain yourself,” Casales said.
“I will,” Needham said. “But first, even though I trust you, I need you to give me a solemn promise that you won’t say any of this to anybody.”
“I promise, you jerk.”
“Good. Here’s the story: After I yelled at Ingram, mostly for the sake of appearances, I told him he was right. I even pretended to be grateful to him for putting a stop to our investigation. We wouldn’t have gotten any further anyway, I said, and it was partly true. From a purely technical point of view we were out of options. We’d done everything and then some, but it was pointless. The hacker put red herrings all over the place and kept leading us into new mazes and labyrinths. One of my guys said that even if we got to the end, against all odds, we wouldn’t believe we’d made it. We’d kid ourselves that it was a new trap. We were prepared for just about anything from this hacker, anything but flaws and weaknesses. So if we kept going the usual way, we’d had it.”
“You don’t tend to go the usual way.”
“No, I prefer the roundabout way. The truth is, we hadn’t given up at all. We’d been talking to our hacker contacts out there and our friends in the software companies. We did advanced searches, surveillance, and our own computer breaches. You see, when an attack is as complex as this one, you can always be sure there’s been some research up front. Certain specific questions have been asked. Certain specific sites have been visited and inevitably some of that becomes known to us. But there was one factor above all that played into our hands, Alona: the hacker’s skill. It was so incredible that it limited the number of suspects. Like a criminal suddenly running a hundred metres in 9.7 seconds at a crime scene—you’d be pretty sure the guy is a certain Mr. Bolt or one of his close rivals, right?”
“So it’s at that level?”
“Well, there are parts of this attack that just made my jaw drop, and I’ve seen a fair amount in my day. That’s why we spent a hell of a lot of time talking to hackers and insiders in this industry and asking them: Who is capable of something really, really big? Who are the seriously big players these days? We had to be pretty smart about how we framed our questions, so that nobody would guess what actually happened. For a long time we got nowhere. It was like shooting in the dark—like calling out into the dead of night. Nobody knew anything, or they claimed they didn’t. A few names were mentioned, but none of them felt right. For a while we chased down some Russian, a Jurij Bogdanov—an ex-druggie and thief who apparently can hack into anything he damn well likes. The security companies were already trying to recruit him when he was living on the street in St. Petersburg, hot-wiring cars, weighing in at 90 pounds of skin and bone. Even the people from the police and intelligence services wanted him on their
side. They lost that battle, needless to say. These days Bogdanov looks clean and successful and has ballooned to 130 pounds of skin and bone, but we’re pretty sure he’s one of the crooks in your organization, Alona. That was another reason he interested us. There had to be a connection to the Spiders, because of the searches that got carried out, but then…”
“You couldn’t understand why one of their own would be giving us new leads and associations?”
“Exactly, and so we looked further. After a while another outfit cropped up in the conversations.”
“Which one?”
“They call themselves Hacker Republic. They have a big reputation out there. A bunch of talents at the top of their game and rigorous about their encryptions. And for good reason. We’re constantly trying to infiltrate these groups, and we’re not the only ones. We don’t just want to find out what they’re up to, we also want to recruit people. These days there’s big competition for the sharpest hackers.”
“Now that we’ve all become criminals.”
“Ha, yes, maybe. Whatever, Hacker Republic has major talent. Lots of the guys we talked to backed that up. And it wasn’t just that. There were also rumours that they had something big going on, and then a hacker with the handle Bob the Dog, who we think is linked to the gang, was running searches and asking questions about one of our guys, Richard Fuller. Do you know him?”
“No.”
“A manic-depressive, self-righteous prick who’s been bugging me for a while. The archetypal security risk who gets arrogant and sloppy when he’s in a manic phase. He’s just the kind of person a bunch of hackers should be targeting, and you’d need classified information to know that. His mental health issues aren’t exactly common knowledge, his own mother hardly knows. But I’m pretty confident that in the end they didn’t get in via Fuller. We’ve examined every file he’s received recently and there’s nothing there. We’ve scrutinized him from top to bottom. But I bet Fuller was part of Hacker Republic’s original plan and then they changed strategies. I can’t claim to have any hard evidence against them, not at all, but my gut feeling is still that these guys are behind the break-in.”
“You said the hacker was a girl.”
“Right. Once we’d homed in on this group we found out as much as possible about them. It wasn’t easy to separate rumour from myth and from fact. But one thing came up so often that in the end I saw no reason to question it.”
“And what’s that?”
“Hacker Republic’s big star is someone who uses the alias Wasp.”
“Wasp?”
“I won’t bore you with technical details, but Wasp is something of a legend in certain circles, one of the reasons being her ability to turn accepted methods on their heads. Someone said you can sense Wasp’s involvement in a hacker attack the same way you can recognize Mozart in a melodic loop. Wasp has her own unmistakable style and that was the first thing one of my guys said after he’d studied the breach: this is different from anything we’ve come across, it’s got a completely new threshold of originality.”
“A genius, in short.”
“Without a doubt. So we started to search everything we could find about this Wasp, to try to crack the handle. No-one was particularly surprised when that didn’t work. This person wouldn’t leave openings. But you know what I did then?” Needham said proudly.
“Tell me.”
“I looked up what the word stood for.”
“Beyond its literal meaning, you mean?”
“Right, but not because I or anyone else thought it would get us anywhere. Like I said, if you can’t get there on the main road, you take the side roads; you never know what you might find. It turns out Wasp could mean all sorts of things. Wasp is a British fighter plane from World War Two, a comedy by Aristophanes, a famous short film from 1915, a satirical magazine from nineteenth-century San Francisco, and there’s also of course White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, plus a whole lot more. But those references are all a little too sophisticated for a hacker genius; they don’t go with the culture. You know what did fit? The superhero in Marvel Comics: Wasp is one of the founding members of the Avengers.”
“Like the movie?”
“Exactly, with Thor, Iron Man, Captain America. In the original comics she was even their leader for a while. I have to say, Wasp is a pretty badass superhero, kind of rock-and-roll, a rebel who wears black and yellow with insect’s wings and short black hair. She’s got attitude, the underdog who hits back and can grow or shrink. All the sources we’ve been talking to think that’s the Wasp we’re looking for. It doesn’t necessarily mean the person behind the handle is some Marvel Comics geek. That handle has been around for a while, so maybe it’s a childhood thing that stuck, or an attempt at irony. Like the fact that I named my cat Peter Pan even though I never liked that self-righteous asshole who doesn’t want to grow up. Anyway…”
“Yes?”
“I couldn’t help noticing that this criminal network Wasp was looking into also uses names from Marvel Comics. They sometimes call themselves the Spider Society, right?”
“Yes, but I think that’s just a game, as I see it, sticking it to those of us who monitor them.”
“Sure, I get that, but even jokes can give you leads, or cover up something serious. Do you know what the Spider Society in Marvel Comics does?”
“No.”
“They wage war against the ‘Sisterhood of the Wasp.’ ”
“OK, fine, it’s an interesting detail, but I don’t understand how that could be your lead.”
“Just wait. Will you come downstairs with me? I have to head to the airport soon.”
—
It was not late, but Blomkvist knew that he could not keep going much longer. He had to go home and get a few hours’ sleep and then start working again tonight or tomorrow morning. It might help too if he had a few beers on the way. The lack of sleep was pounding in his forehead and he needed to chase away a few memories and fears. Perhaps he could get Zander to join him. He looked over at his colleague.
Zander had youth and energy to spare. He was banging away at his keyboard as if he had just started work for the day and every now and then he flicked excitedly through his notes. Yet he had been in the office since five o’clock in the morning. It was now a quarter to six in the evening and he had hardly taken a break.
“What do you say, Andrei? How about we get a beer and a bite to eat and discuss the story?”
At first Zander did not seem to understand. Then he raised his head and suddenly no longer looked quite so energetic. He gave a little grimace as he massaged his shoulder.
“What…well…maybe,” he said hesitantly.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” said Blomkvist. “How about Folksoperan?”
Folksoperan was a bar and restaurant on Hornsgatan, not far away, which attracted journalists and the arty crowd.
“It’s just that…” Zander said.
“Just that what?”
“I’ve got this portrait to do, of an art dealer working at Bukowski’s who got onto a train at Malmö Central and was never seen again. Erika thought it would fit into the mix.”
“Jesus, the things she makes you do, that woman.”
“I honestly don’t mind. But I’m having trouble pulling it together. It feels so messy and contrived.”
“Do you want me to have a look at it?”
“I’d love that, but let me do some more work on it first. I would die of embarrassment if you saw it in its present state.”
“In that case deal with it later. But come on now, Andrei, let’s go and at least get something to eat. You can come back and work afterwards if you must,” Blomkvist said. He looked over at Zander.
That memory would stay with him for a long time. Zander was wearing a brown checked jacket and a white shirt buttoned up all the way. He looked like a film star, at any rate even more like a young Antonio Banderas than usual.
“I think I’d better stay and keep plugging away,” h
e said. “I have something in the fridge which I can microwave.”
Blomkvist wondered if he should pull rank, order him to come out and have a beer. Instead he said:
“OK, we’ll see each other in the morning. How are they doing out there meanwhile? No drawing of the murderer yet?”
“Seems not.”
“We’ll have to find another solution tomorrow. Take care,” Blomkvist said, getting up and putting on his overcoat.
—
Salander remembered something she had read about savants a long time ago in Science magazine. It was an article by Enrico Bombieri, an expert in number theory, referring to an episode in Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in which a pair of autistic and mentally disabled twins recite staggeringly high prime numbers to each other, as if they could see them before their eyes in some sort of inner mathematical landscape.
What these twins were able to do and what Salander now wanted to achieve were two different things. But there was still a similarity, she thought, and decided to try, however sceptical she might be. So she brought up the encrypted NSA file and her programme for elliptic curve factorization. Then she turned to August. He responded by rocking back and forth.
“Prime numbers. You like prime numbers,” she said.
August did not look at her, or stop his rocking.
“I like them too. And there’s one thing I’m particularly interested in just now. It’s called factorization. Do you know what that is?”
August stared at the table as he continued rocking and did not look as if he understood anything at all.
“Prime number factorization is when we rewrite a number as the product of prime numbers. By product in this context I mean the result of a multiplication. Do you follow me?”
August’s expression did not change, and Salander wondered if she should just shut up.
“According to the fundamental principles of arithmetic, every whole number has a unique prime number factorization. It’s pretty cool. We can produce a number as simple as 24 in all sorts of ways, for example by multiplying 12 by 2 or 3 by 8, or 4 by 6. Yet there’s only one way to factorize it with prime numbers and that’s 2 × 2 × 2 × 3. Are you with me? The problem is even though it’s easy to multiply prime numbers to produce large numbers, it’s often impossible to go the other way, from the answer back to the prime numbers. A really bad person has used this to code a secret message. Do you understand? It’s a bit like mixing a drink: easy to do but harder to unmix again.”
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