The Girl in the Spider's Web

by David Lagercrantz

  Suddenly—without his usual careful planning—he started moving along the side of the house, up to the terrace and the glass doors. Then he stiffened, without at first knowing why—it could have been a sound, a movement, a danger he had only half sensed. He looked up at the rectangular window above him, but from his position he could not see into it. He kept still, now less and less sure of himself. Could it be the wrong house?

  He resolved to get closer and peer in, and then…he was transfixed in the darkness. He was being observed. Those eyes which once before had looked at him were now staring glassily in his direction. That is when he should have reacted. He should have sprinted around to the terrace, gone straight in, and shot the boy. But again he hesitated. He could not bring himself to draw his weapon. Faced with that look, he was lost.

  The boy let out a shrill scream which seemed to set the window vibrating, and only then did Holtser tear himself out of his paralysis and race up to the terrace. Without a moment’s reflection he hurtled straight through the glass doors and fired with what he thought was great precision, but he never found out whether he hit his target.

  An explosive shadowlike figure came at him with such speed that he hardly had time to brace himself. He knew that he fired another shot and that someone shot back. In the next instant he slammed onto the floor with his full weight, a young woman tumbling over him with a rage in her eyes that was beyond anything he had ever seen. He reacted instinctively and tried to shoot again. But the woman was like a wild animal. She threw her head back and…Crack!

  When he came to he had a taste of blood in his mouth and his pullover was sticky and wet. He must have been hit. Just then the boy and the woman passed him, and he tried to grab hold of the boy’s leg. At least he thought he did. But suddenly he was gasping for breath.

  He no longer understood what was going on. Except that he was beaten, and by whom? By a woman. That insight became a part of his pain as he lay on the floor amid broken glass and his own blood, breathing heavily, his eyes shut. He hoped it would be over soon. When he opened his eyes again he was surprised to see the woman still there. Had she not just left? No, she was standing by the table, he could see her thin boyish legs. He tried his utmost to get up. He looked for his weapon, and at the same time caught a glimpse of Orlov through the window. He moved once more to attack the woman.

  But before he could do anything the woman grabbed some papers and stormed out. From the terrace she threw herself headlong into the trees. Shots resounded in the dark and he muttered to himself, “Kill the bastards.” But it was all he could do to get to his feet, and he cast a dull glance at the table in front of him.

  There was a mass of crayons and paper which he looked at without really focusing. Then it was as if a claw took hold of his heart. He saw an evil demon with a pale face raising his hand to kill. It took a second or so for him to realize that the demon was himself, and he shuddered. Yet he could not take his eyes off the image.

  Only then did he notice something scribbled at the top:

  Mailed to police 4:22.

  CHAPTER 27

  NOVEMBER 24—MORNING

  When Aram Barzani of the Rapid Response Unit made his way into Gabriella Grane’s house at 4:52 he saw a large man dressed in black spread-eagled on the floor next to the round table.

  He approached cautiously. The house seemed to have been abandoned, but he was not taking any risks. There were recent reports of a fierce gunfight up at the house and he could hear the excited voices of his colleagues outside on the steep rock slope.

  “Here!” they shouted. “Here!”

  Barzani did not understand what was going on, and for a moment he hesitated. Should he go to them? He decided to first see what condition the man on the floor was in. Broken glass and blood lay all around, and the table was strewn with torn-up pieces of paper and crushed crayons. The man on the ground was crossing himself feebly. He was mumbling something. Probably a prayer. It sounded Russian, Barzani caught the word “Olga.” He told the man that a medical team was on its way.

  “They were sisters,” the man said in English.

  But it sounded so confused that Barzani attached no importance to it. Instead he searched through the man’s clothes, made sure that he was unarmed, and thought he had probably been shot in the stomach. His pullover was soaked in blood, and he looked alarmingly pale. Barzani asked what had happened. He got no reply, not at first. Then the man gasped out another strange sentence.

  “My soul was captured in a drawing,” he said, and seemed to be about to lose consciousness.

  Barzani stayed for a few minutes to watch him, but when he heard from the ambulance crew he left the man and went down to the rocky slope. He wanted to discover what his colleagues had been shouting about. The snow was still falling and it was icy underfoot. Down by the water voices could be heard and the sound of more cars arriving. It was still dark and hard to see and there were many uneven rocks and straggly pines. The landscape was dramatic and steep. It could not have been easy to fight in this terrain and Barzani was gripped with foreboding. He noticed that it had become strangely quiet.

  But his team members were not far away behind an overgrown aspen. He felt afraid—a rare occurrence for him—when he saw them staring down at the ground. What had they seen? Was the autistic boy dead?

  He walked over slowly, thinking about his own boys, six and nine now. They were crazy about football—did nothing else, talked about nothing else. Björn and Anders. He and Dilvan had given them Swedish names because they had thought it would make their lives easier. What kind of people come out here to kill a child? He was gripped by a sudden fury. But in the next moment he breathed a sigh of relief.

  There was no boy there, but two men lying on the ground, apparently both shot in the stomach. One of them—a brutal-looking type with pock-marked skin and a stubby boxer’s nose—tried to get up but was pushed down again. His face betrayed his humiliation and his right hand was shaking with pain or rage. The other man, who was wearing a leather jacket and had his hair in a ponytail, seemed in worse shape. He lay still and stared in shock at the dark sky.

  “No evidence of the child?” Barzani said.

  “Nothing,” his colleague Klas Lang answered.

  “And the woman?”

  “No sign of her.”

  Barzani was not sure if this was good news and he asked a few more questions. But no-one knew what had happened. The only certainty was that two automatic weapons, Barrett REC7s, had been found thirty or forty yards away, towards the jetty. They were assumed to belong to the men, but when asked how they had ended up there, the man with the pock-marked face spat out an incomprehensible answer.

  Barzani and his colleagues spent the next fifteen minutes combing the terrain. All they could find were further signs of combat. More and more people began to arrive on the scene: ambulance crew, Detective Sergeant Modig, two or three crime scene technicians, a succession of regular policemen, and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who was accompanied by a massive American with a crew cut who immediately commanded everyone’s respect. At 5:25 they were informed that a witness was waiting to be interviewed down by the seashore and parking area. The man wanted to be addressed as K.G. He was actually called Karl-Gustav Matzon. He had recently bought a new-build on the other side of the water. According to Lang, he needed to be taken with a grain of salt: “The old boy has a very vivid imagination.”

  —

  Modig and Holmberg were standing in the parking area, trying to make sense of what had happened. The picture so far was fragmented and they were hoping that the witness K.G. Matzon would bring a measure of clarity to the night.

  But when they saw him coming towards them along the shoreline, that seemed less and less likely. K.G. Matzon was resplendent in a Tyrolean hat, green checked trousers, and a red Canada Goose jacket and he was sporting an absurd twirly moustache. He looked as if he were trying to be funny.

  “K.G. Matzon?” Modig asked.

  “The v
ery same,” he said, and without any prompting—maybe he realized that his credibility needed a boost—he explained that he ran True Crimes, a publishing house which produced books on notable crimes.

  “Excellent. But right now we’d like a factual account, not some sales pitch for a forthcoming book,” Modig said, to be on the safe side.

  Matzon said of course he understood. He was after all a “respectable person.” He had woken up at a ridiculous hour, he said, and lain there listening to “the silence and the calm.” But just before 4:30 he heard something which he immediately recognized as a pistol shot, so he quickly got dressed and went onto his terrace—which had a view of the beach, the rock promontory, and the parking area where they were now standing.

  “What did you see?”

  “Nothing. It was eerily quiet. Then the air exploded. It sounded as if a war had broken out.”

  “You heard more shots?”

  “There were cracks of gunfire from the promontory on the other side of the inlet and I stared across, stunned, and then…did I mention I was a birdwatcher?”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Well, it’s made my eyesight very good, you see. I’ve got eagle eyes. I’m used to pinpointing tiny details far off, and I’m sure that’s why I noticed a small dot on the rock ledge up there, do you see it? The edge of it sort of cuts into the slope like a pocket.”

  Modig looked up at the slope and nodded.

  “At first I couldn’t tell what it was,” Matzon continued. “But then I realized it was a child, a boy I think. He was sitting up there in a crouch and trembling, at least that’s how it seemed to me, and then suddenly…my God, I’ll never forget it.”

  “What?”

  “Someone came racing down from above, a woman, and she leaped into the air and landed so violently on the rock ledge that she all but fell off it. After that they sat there together, she and the boy, and just waited, waited for the inevitable. And then…”

  “Yes?”

  “Two men appeared holding assault rifles and shot and shot. As I’m sure you can imagine, I threw myself to the ground. I was scared I’d get hit. But I couldn’t help looking up at them all the same. You see, from where I was the boy and the girl were clearly visible, but they were invisible to the men standing at the top, at least for the moment. It was obvious to me that it was only a matter of time before they were discovered and there was no escape. As soon as they left the rock ledge the men would see them and kill them. It was a hopeless situation.”

  “But we’ve found neither the boy nor the woman up there,” Modig said.

  “That’s just it! The men got closer and closer—they only needed to lean forward to see the woman and the child. In the end they could probably have heard them breathing. But then…”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not going to believe this. That man from the Rapid Response Unit definitely didn’t.”

  “Well, go ahead and tell me, and we can worry later about whether it’s believable.”

  “When the men stopped to listen, maybe they sensed they were very close, the woman leaped to her feet and shot them. Bang, bang! Then she rushed forward and threw their weapons away. It was like an action film, and after that she ran, or rather rolled, almost fell down the slope with the boy to a BMW standing here in the parking area. Just before they got into the car I saw that the woman was holding something, it looked like a computer bag.”

  “Did they drive off in the BMW?”

  “At a fearful speed. I have no idea where they went.”

  “OK.”

  “But that’s not all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There was another car there, a Range Rover, I think, black, a new model.”

  “And what happened to that one?”

  “I was busy ringing the emergency services, but just as I was about to hang up I saw two more people coming down from the wooden stairs over there, a tall skinny man and a woman. I didn’t get a good look at them from that distance. But I can tell you two things about that woman.”

  “Yes?”

  “She was a twelve-pointer, and she was angry.”

  “Twelve-pointer meaning beautiful?”

  “Or at least glamorous, classy. You could see it a mile off. But, boy, was she furious. Just before they got into the Range Rover she slapped the man, and the weird thing is: he hardly reacted. He just nodded as if he thought he deserved it. Then he got behind the wheel and they were gone.”

  Modig noted everything down, realizing that she had to get out a nationwide search bulletin for both the Range Rover and the BMW without delay.

  —

  Gabriella Grane was drinking a cappuccino in her kitchen on Villagatan and thinking that she was holding it together, all things considered. But she was probably in shock.

  Helena Kraft wanted to see her at 8:00 a.m. in her office at Säpo. Grane guessed that she wouldn’t just get the sack. There would be judicial consequences too, which would pretty much ruin her prospects of finding another job. At thirty-three, her career was over.

  And that was by no means the worst of it. She had known that she was flouting the law and had taken a conscious risk. But she had done it because she believed it was the best way to protect Frans Balder’s son. Now, after the shoot-out at her summer place, no-one seemed to know where the boy was. He might be injured, or even dead. Grane was racked by the most devastating feelings of guilt: first the father and then the son.

  She got up and looked at the clock. It was 7:15 and she needed to get going to give herself time to clean out her desk before the meeting with Kraft. She made up her mind to behave with dignity, to not make any excuses or beg to be allowed to stay. Her Blackphone rang, but she couldn’t be bothered to answer. Instead she put on her boots and her Prada coat and an extravagant red scarf. If she was going under, she might as well go with a bit of panache. She stood in front of the hall mirror and touched up her makeup, wryly giving herself the victory sign, as Nixon had when he resigned. Then her Blackphone rang again. This time she picked up reluctantly. It was Casales at the NSA.

  “I just heard,” she said.

  Of course she had.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “How do you think?”

  “Like the worst person in the whole world?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Who’ll never get another job?”

  “Spot on, Alona.”

  “In that case let me tell you, you have nothing to be ashamed of. You did the right thing.”

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “This isn’t the time for jokes, sweetheart. You have a mole on your team.”

  Gabriella took a deep breath. “Who is it?”

  “Nielsen.”

  Gabriella froze. “Do you have proof?”

  “Oh yes, I’ll send it all over in a few minutes.”

  “Why would Nielsen betray us?”

  “I guess he didn’t see it as a betrayal.”

  “What on earth did he see it as, if not betrayal?”

  “Collaborating with Big Brother maybe, doing his duty by the leading nation in the free world, what do I know?”

  “So he gave you information.”

  “He helped us to help ourselves, actually. He gave us information about your server and your encryption. It’s not as outrageous as it sounds. Let’s face it, we listen in on everything from the neighbours’ gossip to the prime ministers’ phone calls.”

  “But this time the information was leaked a stage further.”

  “In this case it seeped out like we were a funnel. I know, Gabriella, that you didn’t exactly stick to the rule book. But I’m absolutely convinced that you were in the right, and I’ll make sure your superiors get to hear it. You could see that there was something rotten in your organization, so you couldn’t act within it, yet you were determined not to shirk your responsibility.”

  “But it went wrong.”

  “Sometimes things go wrong, no
matter how careful you are.”

  “Thanks, Alona, it’s nice of you to say so. But if anything has happened to August Balder, I will never forgive myself.”

  “Gabriella, the boy is OK. He’s cruising around in a car somewhere with Miss Salander, in case someone’s still chasing them.”

  Grane could not take it in. “What do you mean?”

  “That he’s unhurt, babe, and thanks to him his father’s murderer has been caught and identified.”

  “You’re saying August is alive?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Let’s just say I have a very well-placed source.”

  “Alona…”

  “Yes?”

  “If what you say is true, you’ve given me back my life.”

  After hanging up, Grane rang Kraft and insisted that Mårten Nielsen be present at their meeting. Reluctantly, Kraft agreed.

  —

  It was 7:30 in the morning when Needham and Blomkvist made their way down the steps from Grane’s summer house to the Audi in the parking area by the beach. Snow lay over the landscape and neither of them said a word. At 5:30 Blomkvist had gotten a text message from Salander, as brisk and to the point as ever.

 

  Again Salander had not mentioned her own state of health. But it was an incredible relief to hear about the boy. Afterwards Blomkvist had been questioned at length by Modig and Holmberg and he told them every detail of what he and the magazine had been doing over the past few days. They were not particularly well disposed towards him, yet he got the feeling that somehow they understood. Now, an hour later, he was walking past the jetty. Up the slope a deer scampered into the forest. Blomkvist settled into the driver’s seat and waited for Needham, who came loping along in his wake. The American’s back was giving him trouble.

  On the way towards Brunn they found themselves in traffic. For several minutes no cars were moving and Blomkvist thought of Zander, who was constantly on his mind. They had still not had any sign of life.