The Girl in the Spider's Web

by David Lagercrantz

  Salander considered killing him. Instead she kicked him hard in the throat and stomach and threw away his weapon. Then she ran across the terrace with August and down towards the steep rocky slope. But suddenly she thought of the drawing. She had not seen how much progress August had made. Should she turn around? No, the others would be here any moment. They had to get away. But still…the drawing was also a weapon, and the cause of all this madness. She left August with her computer on the rock ledge she had identified the night before. She then launched herself back up the slope and into the house and looked on the table, and at first she could not see it. Drawings of that bastard Westman were everywhere, and rows of prime numbers.

  But there—there it was, and above the chess squares and the mirrors there was now a pale figure with a sharply defined scar on his forehead, which Salander by now recognized only too well. It was the same man who was lying on the floor in front of her, moaning. She whipped out her mobile, took a photo and sent it to Bublanski and Modig. She had even scribbled a line at the top of the paper. But a second later she realized that was a mistake.

  They were surrounded.

  —

  Salander had sent the same word to Blomkvist’s Samsung as she had to Berger: CRISIS. It hardly left room for misunderstanding, not coming from Salander. However he looked at it, it could only mean that she and August had been discovered, and at worst they were under attack even now. He floored the accelerator as he passed Stadsgårdskajen and emerged onto the Värmdö road.

  He was driving a new silver Audi A8, with Needham sitting next to him. Needham looked grim, and every now and then tapped something into his mobile. Blomkvist was not sure why he had allowed him to come along. Maybe he wanted to discover what the man had on Salander, or no, there was something else as well. Maybe Needham could even be useful. In any case he could hardly make the situation worse. The police had by now been alerted, but he doubted they would be able to assemble a unit quickly enough—especially as they were sceptical about the lack of information. Berger had been the focal point, trying to keep them all in contact with each other, and she was the only one who knew the way. He needed all the help he could get.

  He was approaching Danviksbron. Needham said something, he did not hear what. His thoughts were elsewhere. He thought of Zander—what had they done to him? Why the hell had he not come along for a beer? Blomkvist tried his number again. He tried calling Salander too. But nobody answered.

  “Do you want me to tell you what we have on your hacker?” Needham said.

  “Yes…why not.”

  But they did not get anywhere this time either. Blomkvist’s mobile rang. Bublanski.

  “I hope you realize that you and I are going to have a lot to talk about later, and you can count on there being legal consequences.”

  “I understand.”

  “But for now I’m calling to give you some information. We know that Lisbeth Salander was alive at 4:22. Was that before or after she texted you?”

  “Before, just before.”

  “OK.”

  “How can you be so specific about the time?”

  “She sent us something extremely interesting. A drawing. I have to say, Mikael, it exceeded our hopes.”

  “So she was able to get the boy to draw.”

  “Oh yes. I have no idea what technical issues, if any, might arise in terms of admissibility of evidence or what objections a clever defence lawyer might raise. But as far as I’m concerned there’s no doubt this is the murderer. The drawing is incredibly vivid, with that extraordinary mathematical precision again. In fact there’s also an equation written at the bottom of the page, I have no idea if it’s relevant to the case. But I sent the drawing to Interpol. If the man is anywhere in their database, he’s toast.”

  “Are you going to send it to the press as well?”

  “We’re debating that.”

  “When will you be at the scene?”

  “As soon as possible…hold on a second.”

  Blomkvist could hear another telephone ringing in the background, and for a minute or so Bublanski was gone on another call. When he returned he said briefly:

  “We’ve had reports of gunfire out there. It doesn’t sound good.”

  Blomkvist took a deep breath.

  “Any news on Andrei?” he said.

  “We’ve traced his mobile signal to a base station in Gamla Stan, but no further. We’ve had no signal at all for a while now, as if the mobile had been smashed or just stopped working.”

  Blomkvist drove even faster. Fortunately the roads were empty at that hour. At first he said very little to Needham, just a brief account of what was going on, but in the end he could not hold back. He needed something else to think about.

  “Will you tell me what you’ve found out?”

  “About Wasp? For a long time, zip. We were convinced we’d reached the end of the line,” Needham said. “We’d left no stone unturned, and still got nowhere. In a way it made sense.”

  “How so?”

  “A hacker capable of a breach like that should also be able to cover all tracks. I realized we wouldn’t get anywhere by conventional means. So I skipped the forensic bullshit and went straight for the big question: Who had the chops to pull this off? That question was our best hope. There’s hardly anyone out there with that level of ability. In that sense, you could say that the hacker’s skill worked against them. Plus, we had analyzed the rootkit itself, and…”

  Needham looked down at his mobile.

  “Yes?”

  “It had artistic qualities. Personal style, you might say. Now we just had to find its author, and so we started to send posts to the hacker community. There was one name, one handle, which came up time after time. Can you guess which one?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It was Wasp. Sure, there were other names, but Wasp stood out. I ended up hearing so much mythical bullshit about this person that I was dying to crack their identity. We read every word Wasp had written online, studied every operation that had Wasp’s signature on it. Soon we were certain that Wasp was a woman, and we guessed that she was Swedish. Several of the early posts were written in Swedish, which isn’t much to go on, but since there was a Swedish connection in the organization she was tracking, and Frans Balder was Swedish, it was at least a place to start. I got in touch with the NDRE, and they searched their records, and then in fact…”

  “What?”

  “They had a breakthrough. Many years earlier they investigated a hacker operation that used that very handle, Wasp. It was so long ago that Wasp wasn’t even particularly good at encryption yet.”

  “What happened?”

  “Wasp had been looking for data on individuals who’d defected from other countries’ intelligence services, and that was enough to trigger the NDRE’s warning system. Their investigation led them to a psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala, to a computer belonging to the head physician there, a man named Teleborian. Apparently he’d done some work for the Swedish Security Police, so he was above suspicion. Instead the NDRE concentrated on some mental health nurses who were targeted because they were…well, to be blunt about it, immigrants. It was such a stupid strategy. Anyway, nothing came of it.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “So I asked a guy at the NDRE to send over all the old material, and we sifted through it with a different mindset. You know, you don’t have to be big and fat and shave in the mornings to be a good hacker. I’ve met twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who are crazy good. It was obvious to me that we should look at every child in the clinic at the time. I had three of my guys investigate each one of them, inside and out, and do you know what we found? One of the children was the daughter of former spy and arch-villain Zalachenko, who was known to our colleagues at the CIA. Then everything got really interesting. As you probably know there are some overlaps between the network the hacker was investigating and Zalachenko’s old crime syndicate.”

  “That doesn’t necessaril
y mean it was Wasp who hacked you.”

  “Of course not. But we took a closer look at this girl, and what can I say? She has an interesting background, doesn’t she? A lot of information about her in the public record has been mysteriously deleted, but we still found more than enough and…I don’t know, I could be wrong, but I get the feeling we’re on the right track. Mikael, you don’t know shit about me. But I know what it’s like for a kid to see extreme violence at close quarters. And I know what it’s like when society doesn’t lift a finger to punish the guilty. It hurts like hell, and I’m not at all surprised that most children who experience it go under. They turn into destructive bastards themselves.”

  “Yes, unfortunately.”

  “But just a few grow to be as strong as bears, Mikael, and they stand up and fight back. Wasp was one of those, wasn’t she?”

  Blomkvist nodded pensively and pressed down on the accelerator a little more.

  “They locked her up and kept trying to break her. But she kept coming back, and do you know what I think?”

  “No.”

  “She got stronger each time. She became positively lethal. I bet she hasn’t forgotten a single thing that happened. It’s all etched into her, isn’t it? And maybe that’s at the bottom of this whole goddamn mess.”

  “You still haven’t told me what you want,” Blomkvist said bluntly.

  “I want what Wasp wants. I want to set some things right.”

  “And get your hands on the hacker.”

  “I want to meet her and give her a piece of my mind and plug every last damn hole in our security. But above all I want to retaliate against certain people who wouldn’t let me finish my job because Wasp exposed them. I have reason to believe you’re going to help me with that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re a good reporter. Good reporters don’t want dirty secrets to go on being dirty secrets.”

  “And Wasp?”

  “Wasp is going to get a chance to do her worst. You’re going to help me with that too.”

  “Or else?”

  “Or else I’ll find a way of putting her inside, and making her life hell again, I swear.”

  “But for now all you want to do is talk to her?”

  “No fucker is going to be allowed to hack into my system again, so I need to understand exactly how she did it. I want you to give her that message. I’m prepared to let your girlfriend go free if she’ll sit down with me and explain.”

  “I’ll tell her. Let’s just hope…”

  “That she’s still alive,” Needham said. They turned left at high speed in the direction of Ingaröstrand.

  —

  It was rare for Holtser to get things so wrong.

  He had this romantic delusion that you could tell from a distance if a man was likely to succeed in close combat. That was why he had not been surprised when Kira’s attempted seduction of Blomkvist had failed. Orlov and Bogdanov had been completely confident. But Holtser had had his doubts having seen the journalist for only one giddy second in Saltsjöbaden. Blomkvist looked like a problem. He looked like a man who could not be fooled or broken so easily.

  With the younger journalist it was different. He looked like the archetypal weakling, yet nothing could have been further from the truth. Zander had resisted for longer than anyone Holtser had ever tortured. Despite excruciating pain he had refused to break. His eyes shone with a grim determination which seemed buttressed by a higher principle, and at one point Holtser thought they would have to give up, that Zander would rather endure any suffering than talk. It was not until Kira solemnly promised that both Berger and Blomkvist from Millennium would be made to suffer the same that Zander finally caved.

  By then it was 3:30 in the morning. Holtser knew that he would always remember the moment. Snow was falling over the skylights. The young man’s face was dried out and hollow-eyed. Blood had splashed up from his chest and flecked his mouth and cheeks. His lips, which for a long time had been covered with tape, were split and oozing. He was a wreck, but still you could tell that he was a beautiful young man.

  Holtser thought of Olga—how would she have felt about him? Wasn’t this journalist just the kind of educated man she liked, someone who fights injustice, takes the side of beggars and outcasts? He thought about that, and about other things in his own life. After that he made the sign of the cross, the Russian cross, where one way leads to heaven and the other to hell, and then he glanced over at Kira.

  She was lovelier than ever. Her eyes burned with light. She was sitting on a stool by the bed wearing an elegant blue dress—which had largely escaped the bloodstains—and said something in Swedish to Zander, something which sounded soft and tender. Then she took him by the hand. He gripped hers in return. He had nowhere else to turn for comfort. The wind howled outside in the alley. Kira nodded and smiled at Holtser. Snowflakes fell on the window ledge.

  —

  Afterwards they were sitting together in a Land Rover on the way out to Ingarö. Holtser felt empty, and was not happy with the way things were going. But there was no getting away from the fact that his own mistake had led them there, so he sat quietly, listening to Kira. She was strangely excited and spoke with searing hatred of the woman they were about to confront. Holtser did not think it was a good sign, and if he could have brought himself to do so he would have urged her to turn back and get the hell out of the country.

  But he said nothing as they drove on in the darkness. Kira’s sparkling, cold eyes frightened him, but he pushed away the thought.

  He had to at least give her credit: she had been amazingly quick to put two and two together. Not only had she worked out who had hurtled in to save the boy on Sveavägen. She had also guessed who would know where the boy and the woman had disappeared to, and the person she came up with was none other than Mikael Blomkvist. They were baffled by her reasoning. Why would a reputable Swedish journalist harbour a person who appeared from nowhere and abducted a child from a crime scene? But the more they examined the theory, the more it held together. Not only did the woman—whose name was Lisbeth Salander—have close ties to the reporter, but something also happened at the Millennium offices.

  After the murder in Saltsjöbaden, Bogdanov had hacked into Blomkvist’s computer to try to find out why Balder had summoned him to his home in the middle of the night. Getting access to his e-mail had been easy enough. But that now stopped. When was the last time it had been impossible for Bogdanov to read someone’s e-mails? Never, so far as Holtser was aware. Blomkvist had suddenly become much more careful—right after the woman and the boy disappeared from Sveavägen.

  That in itself was no guarantee that the journalist knew where they now were. But as time went on there were more indications that the theory might be right, and in any case Kira did not seem to need ironclad evidence. She wanted to go for Blomkvist. Or, if not him, then someone else at the magazine. More than anything she was obsessive in her determination to track down the woman and the child.

  Maybe Holtser could not understand the subtleties of Kira’s motives. But it was for his benefit that they were going to do away with the boy. Kira chose to take significant risks for Holtser, and he was grateful, he really was, even though now in the car he felt uneasy.

  He tried to draw strength from thinking about Olga. Whatever happened, she must not wake up and see a drawing of her father on all the front pages. He tried to reassure himself that the hardest part was behind them. Assuming Zander had given them the right address, the job should be straightforward.

  They were three heavily armed men, four if you counted Bogdanov, who spent most of the time staring at his computer as usual. The team consisted of Holtser, Bogdanov, Orlov, and Dennis Wilton, a gangster who had been a member of Svavelsjö M.C. but now worked for Kira. Four men against one woman who was probably asleep, and was also protecting a child. It shouldn’t be a problem, not at all. But Kira was almost manic:

  “Don’t underestimate Salander!”

 
; She said it so many times that even Bogdanov, who always agreed with everything she said, began to get irritated. Of course Holtser had seen how fit and fast and fearless the woman had been on Sveavägen. But the way Kira described her, she must be some kind of superwoman. It was ridiculous. Holtser had never met a woman who could remotely match him—or even Orlov—in combat. Still, he promised to be careful. First he would go up and check out the terrain and prepare a strategy. They would not be drawn into a trap. He stressed this many times over, and when finally they arrived at an inlet next to a rocky slope and a jetty he took command. He told the others to get ready in the shelter of the car while he went ahead to locate the house.

  —

  Holtser liked early mornings. He liked the silence and the feeling of transition in the air. Now he was walking along, leaning forward and listening. It was reassuringly dark—no lights were on. He left the jetty behind him and came to a wooden fence with a rickety gate, next to an overgrown prickly bush. He opened the gate and started to climb steep wooden stairs holding the handrail on the right.

  Soon he was able to make out the house above. It lay hidden behind pine trees and aspens and was only a dark outline, with a terrace on the south side. On the terrace were some glass doors which they would have no trouble breaking through. At first he saw no major difficulties. He was moving almost soundlessly and for a moment he considered finishing off the job himself. Maybe it was even his moral responsibility. It should be no more difficult than other jobs he had done, on the contrary. There were no policemen this time, no guards, nor any sign of an alarm system. True, he did not have his assault rifle with him, but then there was no need for it. The rifle was excessive, the result of Kira’s heated imagination. He had his pistol, his Remington, and that was more than enough.