Blomkvist got dressed and left his apartment, hurrying through a deserted and storm-lashed Södermalm district up to the magazine offices on Götgatan. With any luck, he thought, Zander would be lying asleep on the sofa. It would not be the first time he had nodded off at work and not heard the telephone. That would be the simple explanation. But Blomkvist felt more and more uneasy. When he opened the door and turned off the alarm he shivered, as if expecting to find a scene of devastation, but after a search of the premises he found no trace of anything untoward. All the information on his encrypted e-mail programme had been carefully deleted, just as they had agreed. It all looked as it should, but there was no Zander lying asleep on the office sofa, which was as shabby and empty as ever. For a short while Blomkvist sat there, lost in thought. Then he rang Grandén again.
“Emil,” he said, “I’m sorry to harass you like this in the middle of the night. But this whole story has made me paranoid.”
“I can understand that.”
“I couldn’t help hearing that you sounded a bit stressed when I was talking about Andrei. Is there anything you haven’t told me?”
“Nothing you don’t already know,” Grandén said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’ve spoken to the Data Inspection Authority too.”
“What do you mean, you too?”
“You mean you haven’t—”
“No!” Blomkvist cut him short and heard Grandén’s breathing at the other end of the line become laboured. There had been a terrible mistake.
“Out with it, Emil, and fast,” he said.
“So…”
“Yes?”
“I had a call from a Lina Robertsson at the Data Inspection Authority. She said that you’d spoken and she agreed to raise the level of security on your computer, given the circumstances. Apparently the recommendations she’d given you were wrong and she was worried the protection would be insufficient. She said she wanted to get hold of the person who’d arranged the encryption for you ASAP.”
“And what did you say?”
“That I knew nothing about it, except that I’d seen Andrei doing something at your computer.”
“So you said she should get in touch with Andrei.”
“I happened to be out at the time and told her that Andrei was probably still in the office. She could ring him there, I said. That was all.”
“Jesus, Emil.”
“She sounded really—”
“I don’t care how she sounded. I just hope you told Andrei about the call.”
“Maybe not right away. I’m pretty snowed under at the moment, like all of us.”
“But you told him later.”
“Well, he left the office before I got a chance to say anything.”
“So you called him instead.”
“Absolutely, several times. But…”
“Yes?”
“He didn’t answer.”
“OK,” Blomkvist said, his voice ice-cold.
He hung up and dialled Bublanski’s number. He had to try twice before the chief inspector came to the telephone. Blomkvist had no choice but to tell him the whole story—except for Salander and August’s location.
Then he called Berger.
—
Salander had fallen asleep, but she was still ready for action. She was in her clothes, with her leather jacket and her boots on. She kept waking up, either because of the howling storm or because August was moaning in his sleep. But each time she dozed off, she had short, strangely realistic dreams.
Now she was dreaming about her father beating her mother, and she could feel that fierce old rage from her childhood. She felt it so keenly that it woke her up again. It was 3:45 a.m. and those scraps of paper on which she and August had written their numbers were still lying on the bedside table. Outside, snow was falling. But the storm seemed to have calmed and nothing unusual could be heard, just the wind rustling through the trees.
She felt uneasy, and at first she thought it was the dream lying like a fine mesh over the room. Then she shuddered. The bed next to her was empty—August was gone. She shot out of bed without making a sound, grabbed her Beretta from the bag on the floor, and crept into the large room next to the terrace.
The next moment she breathed a sigh of relief. August was sitting at the table busy with something. Without wanting to disturb him she leaned over his shoulder and saw that he was not writing new prime number factorizations, or drawing fresh scenes of abuse. He was sketching chess squares reflected in the mirrors of a wardrobe, and above them could be made out a threatening figure with his hand outstretched. The killer was taking shape. Salander smiled, and then she withdrew.
Back in the bedroom she sat on the bed, removed her pullover and the bandage, and inspected the bullet wound. It didn’t look good, and she still felt weak. She swallowed another couple of antibiotic pills and tried to rest. She may even have gone back to sleep for a few moments. She was aware of a vague sensation that she had seen both Zala and Camilla in her dream, and the next second she became aware of a presence, though she had no idea what. A bird flapped its wings outside. She could hear August’s laboured breathing in the kitchen. She was just about to get up when a scream pierced the air.
—
By the time Blomkvist left the office in the early morning hours to take a taxi to the Grand Hôtel, he still had no news of Zander. He tried again to persuade himself that he had been over-reacting, that any moment now his colleague would call from some friend’s place. But the worry would not go away. He was vaguely aware that it had started snowing again, and that a woman’s shoe had been left lying on the sidewalk. He took out his Samsung and called Salander on the RedPhone app.
Salander did not pick up, and that did not make him any calmer. He tried once more and sent a text from his Threema app:
Stockholm was more or less deserted. The storm had abated but there were still white-crested waves on the water. Blomkvist looked across to the Grand Hôtel on the other side and wondered if he should forget about the meeting with Mr. Needham and drive straight out to Salander instead, or at least arrange for a police car to swing by. No, he couldn’t do that without warning her. Another leak would be disastrous. He opened the Threema app again and tapped in:
No answer. Of course there was no answer. He paid the fare and climbed out of the taxi lost in thought. By the time he was pushing through the revolving doors of the hotel it was 4:20 in the morning—he was forty minutes early. He had never been forty minutes early for anything. But he was burning up inside and, before going to the reception desk to hand in his mobiles, he called Berger. He told her to try to get hold of Salander and to keep in touch with the police.
“If you hear anything, call the Grand Hôtel and ask for Mr. Needham’s room.”
“And who’s he?”
“Someone who wants to meet me.”
“At this time of day?”
—
Needham was in room 654. The door opened and there stood a man reeking of sweat and rage. There was about as much resemblance to the figure in the fishing photograph as there would be between a hungover dictator and his stylized statue. Needham had a drink in his hand and looked grim, unkempt, and a little bit like a bulldog.
“Mr. Needham,” Blomkvist said.
“Ed,” Needham said. “I’m sorry to haul you over here at this ungodly hour, but it’s urgent.”
“So it would seem,” Blomkvist said drily.
“Do you have any idea what I want to talk to you about?”
Blomkvist shook his head and sat down on a sofa. There was a bottle of gin and some small bottles of Schwep
pes tonic on the desk next to it.
“No, why would you?” Needham said. “On the other hand it’s impossible to know with guys like you. I’ve checked you out. You should know that I hate to flatter people—it leaves a bad taste in my mouth—but you’re pretty outstanding in your profession, aren’t you?”
Blomkvist gave a forced smile.
“Can we just get to the point?” he said.
“Just relax, I’ll be crystal clear. I assume you know where I work.”
“Not exactly,” he answered truthfully.
“In Puzzle Palace, SIGINT City. I work for the world’s spittoon.”
“The NSA.”
“Damn right. Do you have any idea how fucking insane you have to be to mess with us, Mikael Blomkvist, do you?”
“I have a pretty good idea,” he said.
“And do you know where I think your girlfriend really belongs?”
“No.”
“She belongs behind bars. For life!”
Blomkvist gave what he hoped was a calm, composed little smile. But in fact his mind was spinning. Did Salander hack the NSA? The mere thought terrified him. Not only was she in hiding, with killers on the hunt for her. Was she also going to have the entire U.S. intelligence services descend on her? It sounded…well, how did it sound? It sounded totally off the wall.
One of Salander’s abiding characteristics was that she never did anything without first carefully analyzing the potential consequences. She did not follow impulses or whims and therefore he could not imagine she would take such an idiotic risk if there was the slightest chance of being found out. Sometimes she put herself in harm’s way, that was true, but there was always a balance between costs and benefits. He refused to believe that she had gotten herself in to the NSA, only to allow herself to be outwitted by the splenetic bulldog standing in front of him.
“I think you’re jumping to conclusions,” he said.
“Dream on, dude. But you might be able to save your girlfriend’s skin if you promise to help me with one or two things.”
“I’m listening,” he said.
“Peachy. Let me begin by asking for a guarantee that you won’t quote me as your source.”
Blomkvist looked at him in surprise. He had not expected that.
“Are you some kind of whistle blower?”
“God help me, no. I’m a loyal old bloodhound.”
“But you’re not acting officially on behalf of the NSA.”
“You could say that right now I have my own agenda. Sort of doing my own thing. Well, how about it?”
“I won’t quote you.”
“Great. I also want to make sure we agree that what I’m going to tell you now will stay between us. You might be wondering why the hell I’m telling a fantastic story to an investigative journalist, only to have him keep his trap shut.”
“Good question.”
“I have my reasons. And I trust you, don’t ask me why. I’m betting that you want to protect your girlfriend, and you think the real story is elsewhere. Maybe I’ll even help you with that, if you’re prepared to cooperate.”
“That remains to be seen,” Blomkvist said stiffly.
“Well, a few days ago we had a data breach on our intranet, our NSANet. You know about that, don’t you?”
“More or less.”
“NSANet was created after 9/11, to improve coordination between our own intelligence services and those in other English-speaking countries—known as the Five Eyes. It’s a closed system, with its own routers, portals, and bridges, and it’s completely separate from the rest of the Internet. We administer our signals intelligence from there via satellite and fibre optic cables and that’s also where we have our big databases and store classified analyses and reports: from Moray-rated documents, the least sensitive, all the way up to Umbra Ultra Top Secret, which even the President of the United States isn’t allowed to see. The system is run out of Texas, which by the way is idiotic. But it’s still my baby. Let me tell you, Mikael Blomkvist, I worked my ass off. Hammered away at it day and night so that no fucker could misuse it, never mind hack it. Every single little anomaly sets my alarm bells ringing, plus there’s a whole staff of independent experts monitoring the system. These days you can’t do a goddamn thing online without leaving footprints. At least that’s the theory. Everything is logged and analyzed. You shouldn’t be able to touch a single key without triggering a notification. But…”
“Someone did.”
“Yes, and maybe I could have made my peace with it. There are always weak spots; we can always do better. Weak spots keep us on our toes. But it wasn’t just the fact that she managed to get in. It was how she did it. She forced our server and created an advanced bridge, and got into the intranet via one of our systems administrators. That alone was a damn masterpiece. But that wasn’t all: then the bitch turned herself into a ghost user.”
“A what?”
“A ghost. She flew around in there without anyone noticing.”
“Your alarm bells didn’t go off?”
“That damn genius introduced a Trojan unlike anything else we knew, because otherwise our system would have identified it right away. The malware then kept upgrading her status. She got more and more access and soaked up highly classified passwords and codes and started to link and match records and databases, and suddenly—bingo!”
“Bingo what?”
“She found what she was looking for, and then she stopped wanting to be invisible. She wanted to show us what she’d found, and only then did my alarm bells go off: exactly when she wanted them to.”
“And what did she find?”
“She found our hypocrisy, Mikael, our double-dealing, and that’s why I’m sitting here with you and not on my fat ass in Maryland, sending the Marines after her. She was like a thief breaking into a house just to point out that it was already full of stolen goods, and the minute we found that out she became truly dangerous—so dangerous that some of our senior people wanted to let her off.”
“But not you.”
“Not me. I wanted to tie her to a lamppost and flay her alive. But I had no choice except to give up my pursuit and that, Mikael, seriously pissed me off. I may look calm now, but you should have seen me…Jesus!”
“You were hopping mad.”
“Damn right. And that’s why I had you come here at this godforsaken hour. I need to get hold of Wasp before she flees the country.”
“Why would she run?”
“Because she went from one crazy thing to the next, didn’t she?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“What makes you so sure she’s your hacker in the first place?”
“That, Mikael, is what I’m going to lay on you now.”
But he got no further.
—
The room telephone rang and Needham picked up right away. It was reception looking for Mikael Blomkvist, and Needham handed him the receiver. He soon gathered that the journalist had been given some alarming news, so it was no surprise when the Swede muttered a confused apology and ran out of the room. But Needham would not let him get away that easily. He grabbed his coat and chased after him.
Blomkvist was racing down the corridor like a sprinter. Needham did not know what was going on, but if it had something to do with the Wasp/Balder story, he wanted to be there. He had some trouble keeping up—the journalist was in too much of a hurry to wait for the lift and instead hurtled down the stairs. By the time Needham reached the ground floor, panting, Blomkvist had already retrieved his mobiles and was engrossed in another conversation while he ran on towards the revolving doors and out into the street.
“What’s happening?” Needham said as the journalist ended his call and tried to hail a taxi further down the street.
“Problems!” Blomkvist said.
“I can drive you.”
“Like hell you can. You’ve been drinking.”
“At least we can take my car.”
Blomkvist slowed his pace and turned to Needham.
“What is it you want?”
“I want us to help each other.”
“You’ll have to catch your hacker on your own.”
“I no longer have the authority to catch anybody.”
“OK, so where’s the car?”
As they ran to Needham’s rental car parked over by the Nationalmuseum, Blomkvist hurriedly explained that they were heading out to the Stockholm archipelago, towards Ingarö. He would get directions on the way and was not planning to observe any speed limits.
CHAPTER 26
NOVEMBER 24—MORNING
August screamed, and in the same instant Salander heard rapid footsteps along the side of the house. She grabbed her pistol and jumped to her feet. She felt terrible but ignored it.
As she rushed over to the doorway she saw a large man appear on the terrace. She thought she had a split-second advantage, but the figure did not stop to open the glass doors. He charged straight through them with his weapon drawn and shot at the boy.
Salander returned fire, or perhaps she had already done so, she did not know. She was not even conscious of the moment in which she started running towards the man. She only knew that she had crashed into him with a numbing force and now lay on top of him right by the round table where the boy had been sitting moments before. Without hesitation she headbutted the man.
The contact was so violent that her skull rang, and she swayed as she got to her feet. The room was spinning and there was blood on her shirt. Had she been hit again? She had no time to think. Where was August? No-one at the table, only pencils and drawings, crayons, prime number calculations. Where the hell was he? She heard a whimpering by the refrigerator and yes, there he was, sitting and shaking, his knees drawn up to his chest. He must have had time to throw himself to the floor.
Salander was about to rush over to him when she heard new, worrying sounds from outside, voices and branches snapping. Others were approaching, there was no time to lose. In a blinding flash she visualized the surrounding terrain and raced over to August. “Come on!” she said. August did not budge. Salander picked him up, her face twisted in pain. Every movement hurt. But they had to get away and August must have understood that too because he wriggled out of her grasp and ran alongside her. She sprang over to the table, grabbed her computer, and made for the terrace, past the man on the floor who raised himself groggily and tried to catch hold of August’s leg.
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