“But it wasn’t?”
“No. About a year ago Kajsa looked me up of her own accord, and by then she had changed again. There was nothing reserved or cool about her. This time she was hounded and nervous. Not long after that she was found dead, shot at Stora Mossens sports centre in Bromma. When we met she told me there had been a dispute over the inheritance after Zalachenko’s death. Camilla’s twin sister, Lisbeth, came away more or less empty-handed—apparently she didn’t even want the little that she got—while the majority of the assets fell to Zalachenko’s two surviving sons in Berlin, and some to Camilla. She inherited part of the trafficking business you wrote about in your report, and that made my heart bleed. I doubt Camilla cared about those women, or felt any compassion for them. But still, she didn’t want to have anything to do with those activities. She said to Kajsa that only losers bother with that sort of filth. She had a completely different, modern vision of what the organization should be doing, and after hard negotiation she got one of her half-brothers to buy her out. Then she disappeared to Moscow with her capital and some of the employees who wanted to follow her, Kajsa Falk among them.”
“Do you know what sort of business she was setting up?”
“Kajsa never got enough of an insight to understand it, but we had our suspicions. I think it was to do with those trade secrets at Ericsson. By now I’m almost certain Camilla got Kjell to steal and sell something valuable, presumably by blackmailing him. I’ve also found out that in her first years with us she asked some computer geeks at school to hack into my computer. According to Kajsa, she was more or less obsessed with hacking. Not that she learned anything about it herself, not at all, but she was forever talking about the money one could make by accessing bank accounts and hacking servers and stealing information. She must have developed a business along those lines.”
“That sounds possible.”
“It was probably at a very high level. Camilla would never settle for anything less. According to Kajsa, she soon found her way into influential circles in Moscow, and among other things became the mistress of some rich, powerful member of the Duma—with him she began to forge connections with a strange crew of top engineers and criminals. Because she wound them round her little finger, she knew exactly where the weak point in the domestic economy was.”
“And that was?”
“The fact that Russia is little more than a petrol station with a flag on top. They export oil and natural gas, but manufacture nothing worth mentioning. Russia needs advanced technology.”
“She wanted to give them that?”
“At least that’s what she pretended. But obviously she had her own agenda. I know that Kajsa was impressed by the way she built alliances and got herself political protection. She probably would have been loyal to Camilla forever if she hadn’t become scared.”
“What was she scared of?”
“Kajsa got to know a former elite soldier, a major I believe, and just lost her bearings. According to confidential information that Camilla had access to via her lover, the man had carried out a few shady operations for the Russian government. Among other things he had killed a well-known journalist, I presume you’ve heard of her, Irina Azarova. She’d taken a line against the government in various reports and books.”
“Oh yes, truly a heroine. A horrible story.”
“Absolutely. Something went wrong in the planning. Azarova was supposed to meet a critic of the regime in an apartment on a backstreet in a suburb southeast of Moscow, and according to the plan the major was supposed to shoot her as she came out. But no-one knew that the journalist’s sister had developed pneumonia, and Irina had to look after two nieces aged eight and ten. As she and the girls walked out of the front entrance the major shot all three of them in the face. After that he fell into disgrace—not that anybody was particularly bothered about the children, but public opinion was getting out of hand and there was a risk that the whole operation would be uncovered and turned against the government. I think the major was afraid he’d be made a scapegoat. He was also dealing with a load of personal problems at the same time. His wife took off, he was left alone with a teenage daughter, and I believe there was even a possibility of his being evicted from his apartment. From Camilla’s perspective that was a perfect setup: a ruthless person whom she could use, and who found himself in a vulnerable situation.”
“So she got him on board.”
“Yes, they met. Kajsa was there too, and the strange thing was that she immediately took a liking to this man. He wasn’t at all what she’d been expecting, nothing like the people she knew at Svavelsjö M.C., who were killers. He was very fit and had a brutal look about him, but he was also cultivated and polite, she said, somehow vulnerable and sensitive. Kajsa could tell that he felt terrible about shooting those children. He was a murderer, a man whose speciality had been torture during the war in Chechnya, but he still had his moral boundaries, and that’s why she was so upset when Camilla got her claws into him—almost literally. She dragged her nails across his chest and hissed like a cat, ‘I want you to kill for me.’ Her words were charged with sexual tension and with the skill of the devil she awakened the man’s sadism. The more gruesome his descriptions of his murders, the more excited she became. I’m not sure I understood it, but it scared Kajsa to death. Not the murderer himself—Camilla. Her beauty and allure managed to bring out the predator in him.”
“You never reported this to the police?”
“I asked Kajsa over and over. I told her she needed protection. She said she already had it and she forbade me to talk to the police. I was stupid enough to listen to her. After her death I told the investigators what I’d heard, but I doubt they believed me. It was nothing but hearsay about a man without a name in another country. Camilla was nowhere to be found in any records, and I never discovered anything about her new identity. At any rate Kajsa’s murder is still unsolved.”
“I understand how painful this all must be for you,” Blomkvist said.
“You do?”
“I think so,” he said, and was about to rest a sympathetic hand on her arm.
He was brought up short by his mobile buzzing in his pocket. He hoped it was Zander. But it was Stefan Molde. It took Blomkvist a few seconds to identify him as the person at the NDRE who had been in touch with Linus Brandell.
“What’s this about?” he said.
“A meeting with a senior civil servant, an American who’s on his way to Sweden. He wants to see you as early as possible tomorrow morning at the Grand Hôtel.”
Blomkvist made an apologetic gesture in Fru Dahlgren’s direction.
“I have a tight schedule,” he said, “and if I’m to meet anybody at the very least I want a name and an explanation.”
“The man is Edwin Needham, and it’s about someone using the handle Wasp, who is suspected of serious crimes.”
Blomkvist felt a wave of panic.
“OK,” he said. “What time?”
“Five o’clock tomorrow morning would work.”
“You’ve got to be joking!”
“Regrettably there’s nothing to joke about in all this. I suggest you be punctual. Mr. Needham will see you in his room. You’ll have to leave your mobile at reception, and you’ll be searched.”
Blomkvist got to his feet and took his leave of Margareta Dahlgren.
PART 3
ASYMMETRIC PROBLEMS
NOVEMBER 23–DECEMBER 3
Sometimes it is easier to put together than to put asunder.
Nowadays computers can easily multiply prime numbers with millions of digits. Yet it is extremely complicated to reverse the process. Numbers with only a few hundred digits present huge problems.
Encryption algorithms like RSA take advantage of the difficulties involved in prime number factorization. Prime numbers have become secrecy’s best friends.
CHAPTER 25
NOVEMBER 23–24
It had not taken long for Salander to identify the Roger w
hom August had been drawing. She had seen a younger version of the man on a website showing former actors from Revolutionsteatern in Vasastan. He was called Roger Winter. He had had a couple of major film roles at the beginning of his career, but lately had ended up in a backwater, and was now less well known than his wheelchair-bound brother Tobias, an outspoken professor of biology who was said to have distanced himself altogether from Roger these days.
Salander wrote down Roger Winter’s address and then hacked into the supercomputer NSF MRI. She also opened the programme with which she was trying to construct a dynamic system for finding the elliptic curves which were most likely to do the job, and with as few iterations as possible. But whatever she tried, she was unable to get any closer to a solution. The NSA file remained impenetrable. In the end she went and looked in on August. She swore. The boy was awake, sitting up in bed writing something on a piece of paper, and as she came closer she could see that he was doing more prime number factorizations.
“It’s no good. It’s not getting us anywhere,” she muttered, and when August began to rock back and forth hysterically once again she told him to pull himself together and go back to sleep.
It was late and she decided that she should rest for a while too. She took the bed next to his, but it was impossible to sleep. August tossed and turned and whimpered and in the end Salander decided to say something, to try to settle him. The best she could think of was, “Do you know about elliptic curves?”
Of course she got no answer. That did not deter her from giving as simple and clear an explanation as she could.
“Do you get it?” she said.
Still August did not reply.
“OK, then,” she went on. “Take the number 3,034,267, for example. I know you can easily find its prime number factors. But it can also be done using elliptic curves. Let’s take curve y = x3 – x + 4 and point P = (1:2) on that curve, for example.”
She wrote the equation on a piece of paper on the bedside table. But August did not seem to be following at all. She thought about those autistic twins she had read up on. They had some mysterious way of identifying large prime numbers, yet could not solve the simplest equations. Perhaps August was like that too. Perhaps he was more of a calculating machine than a genuine mathematical talent, and in any case it didn’t matter right now. Her bullet wound was aching again and she needed some sleep. She needed to drive out all her old childhood demons which had come to life again because of the boy.
—
It was past midnight by the time Blomkvist got home, and even though he was exhausted and had to get up at the crack of dawn he sat down at his computer and Googled Edwin Needham.
There were quite a few Edwin Needhams in the world, including a successful rugby player who had made an extraordinary comeback having had leukaemia. There was one Edwin Needham who seemed to be an expert on water purification, and another who was good at getting himself into society photographs and looking daft. But none of them seemed right for someone who could have been involved in cracking Wasp’s identity and accusing her of criminal activity. There was an Edwin Needham who was a computer engineer with a PhD from MIT, and that was at least the right line of business, but not even he seemed to fit. He was now a senior executive at Safeline, a leading business in computer virus protection, and that company would certainly have an interest in hackers. But the statements made by this Ed, as he was known, were all about market share and new products. Nothing he said rated higher than the usual clichéd sales talk, not even when he got the chance to talk about his leisure pursuits: bowling and fly fishing. He loved nature, he said, he loved the competitive aspect…The most threatening thing he seemed capable of doing was boring people to death.
There was a picture of him, grinning and bare-chested, holding up a large salmon, the sort of snap which is a dime a dozen in fishing circles. It was as dull as everything else, and yet, gradually Blomkvist began to wonder whether the dullness might be the whole point. He read through the material again and this time it struck him as something concocted, a façade. Slowly but surely he came to the opposite conclusion: this was the man. You could smell the intelligence service a mile off, couldn’t you? It felt like NSA or CIA.
Once again he looked at the photograph with the salmon, and this time he thought he saw something very different. He saw a tough guy putting on an act. There was something unwavering about the way he stood and grinned mockingly into the camera, at least that is what Blomkvist imagined, and again he thought of Salander. He wondered if he ought to tell her about this meeting. But there was no reason to worry her now, especially since he did not actually know anything, so instead he decided to go to bed. He needed to sleep for a few hours and have a clear head when he met Needham in the morning.
Pensively he brushed his teeth and undressed and climbed into bed. He realized he was more tired than he could have imagined and fell asleep in no time. He dreamed that he was being dragged under and almost drowned in the river Needham had been standing in. Afterwards he had a vague image of himself crawling along the riverbed surrounded by flopping, thrashing salmon. But he cannot have slept for long. He woke with a start and the growing conviction that he had overlooked something. His mobile was lying on the bedside table and his thoughts turned to Zander. The young man must have been on his mind all along.
—
Linda had double-locked the door. There was nothing odd about that—a woman in her situation had to take security precautions. It still made Zander feel uncomfortable, but he put that down to the apartment, or so he tried to convince himself. It was not at all what he had been expecting. Could this really be the home of one of her girlfriends?
The bed was broad but not especially long, and both the headboard and the footboard were made of shiny steel latticework. The bedspread was black, which made him think of a bier and he disliked the pictures on the walls—mostly framed photographs of men with weapons. There was a sterile, chilly feel to the whole place.
On the other hand he was probably just nervous and exaggerating everything, or looking for an excuse to get away. A man always wants to kill the thing he loves—hadn’t Oscar Wilde said something like that? He looked at Linda. Never before had he seen such an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and now she was coming towards him in her tight blue dress which accentuated her figure. As if she had been reading his mind she said, “Would you rather go home, Andrei?”
“I do have quite a lot on my plate.”
“I understand,” she said, kissing him. “Then you must of course go and get on with your work.”
“Maybe that would be best,” he muttered as she pressed herself against him, kissing him with such force that he had no defence.
He responded to her kiss and put his hands on her hips, and she gave him a shove. She pushed him so hard that he staggered and fell backwards onto the bed, and for a moment he was scared. But then he looked at her. She was smiling as tenderly now as before and he thought: This was nothing more than a bit of rough play. She really wanted him, didn’t she? She wanted to make love with him there and then, and he let her straddle his body, unbutton his shirt, and draw her fingernails over his stomach while her eyes shone with an intense glow and her large breasts heaved beneath her dress. Her mouth was open. A trickle of saliva ran down her chin and she whispered something he could not at first hear. “Now, Andrei,” she whispered again. “Now!”
“Now?” he repeated uncertainly, and felt her tearing off his trousers. She was more brazen than he had expected, more accomplished and wildly lascivious than anybody he had met.
“Close your eyes and lie absolutely still,” she said.
He obeyed and could hear her fiddling with something, he was not sure what. Then he heard a click and felt metal around his wrists, and realized he had been handcuffed. He was about to protest, he did not really go in for that sort of thing, but it all happened so fast. With lightning speed, as if she had experience, she locked his hands to the headboard. Then she bound his feet wit
h rope and pulled tight.
“Gently,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” but then she gave him a look he did not like and said something in a solemn voice. He must have misheard. “What?” he said.
“I’m going to cut you with a knife, Andrei,” she said, and fixed a large piece of tape across his mouth.
—
Blomkvist was trying to tell himself not to worry. Why would anything have happened to Zander? No-one—apart from Berger and himself—knew that he was involved in protecting the whereabouts of Salander and the boy. They had been extremely careful with that piece of information, more careful than with any other part of the story. And yet…why had there been no word from him?
Zander was not someone who ignored his phone. On the contrary, he normally picked up on the first ring whenever Blomkvist called. But now there was no way of getting hold of him, and that was strange, wasn’t it? Or maybe…again Blomkvist tried to convince himself that Zander was busy working and had lost track of time, or in the worst case had dropped his mobile. That was probably all it was. But still…after all these years Camilla had appeared out of nowhere. Something must be going on, and what was it Bublanski had said?
“We live in a world in which paranoia is a requirement.”
Blomkvist reached for the telephone on the bedside table and called Zander again. He got no answer this time either, so decided to wake their new staff member, Emil Grandén, who lived near Zander in Röda bergen in Vasastan. Grandén sounded less than enthusiastic but promised to go over to Zander’s right away to see if he was there. Twenty minutes later he rang back. He had been banging on Zander’s door for a while, he said, and he definitely wasn’t at home.
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