The woman in the doorway had a regal bearing but was not tall. She had dark, intense eyes which gave her a melancholy look. She was dressed in a grey coat and a red dress that looked a bit like a sari.
“My name is Farah Sharif,” she said. “I’m a professor of computer sciences and was a close friend of Frans Balder’s.”
“Yes, of course,” said Bublanski, suddenly embarrassed. “Take a seat, please. My apologies for the mess.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“Is that so. Well. To what do I owe this honour?”
“I was far too naïve when I spoke to your colleague.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because I have more information now. I’ve had a long conversation with Professor Warburton.”
“He’s been looking for me too, but it’s been so chaotic, I haven’t had time to call him back.”
“Steven is a professor of cybernetics at Stanford and a leading researcher in the field of technological singularity. These days he works at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, whose aim is to ensure that artificial intelligence is a positive help to mankind rather than the opposite.”
“Well, that sounds good,” said Bublanski, who felt uncomfortable whenever this topic came up.
“Steven lives somewhat in a world of his own. He found out what happened to Frans only yesterday, and that’s why he didn’t call sooner. But he told me that he had spoken to Frans as recently as Monday.”
“What did they discuss?”
“His research. You know, Frans had been so secretive ever since he went off to the States. I was close to him, but not even I knew anything about what he was doing. I was arrogant enough to think I understood some of it at least, but now it turns out I was wrong.”
“In what way?”
“Frans had not only taken his old AI programme a step further, he had also developed fresh algorithms and new topographical material for quantum computers.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Quantum computers are computers based on quantum mechanics. They are many thousand times faster in certain areas than conventional computers. The great advantage with quantum computers is that the fundamental constituent quantum bits—qubits—can superposition themselves.”
“They can what?”
“Not only can they take the binary positions one or zero as do traditional computers, they can also be both zero and one at the same time. For the time being quantum computers are much too specialized and cumbersome. But—how can I best explain this to you?—Frans appeared to have found ways to make them easier, more flexible and self-learning. He was onto something great, at least potentially. But as well as feeling proud of his breakthrough, he was also worried—and that was the reason he called Steven Warburton.”
“Why was he worried?”
“In the long term, because he suspected his creation could become a threat to the world, I imagine. But more immediately because he knew things about the NSA.”
“What sort of things?”
“I don’t know anything about that aspect of his discoveries. He somehow stumbled upon the messier side of their industrial espionage. But I do know this: It’s no secret that the organization is working hard specifically to develop quantum computers. For the NSA that would be paradise, pure and simple. An effective quantum machine would actually enable them to crack all encryptions, all digital security systems. Then no-one would be safe from that organization’s watchful eye.”
“A hideous thought,” said Bublanski with surprising feeling.
“But there is an even more frightening scenario: if such a thing were to fall into the hands of major criminals,” Farah Sharif said.
“I see what you’re getting at.”
“So I’m keen to know what you’ve managed to get hold of from the men now under arrest.”
“Unfortunately nothing like that,” he said. “But these men are not exactly outstanding intellects. I doubt they would even pass secondary school maths.”
“The real computer genius got away?”
“I’m afraid so. He and a female suspect have disappeared without a trace. They probably have a number of identities.”
“Worrying.”
Bublanski nodded and gazed into Farah Sharif’s dark eyes, which looked beseechingly at him. A hopeful thought stopped him from sinking back into despair.
“I’m not sure what it means,” he said.
“What?”
“We’ve had IT guys go through Balder’s computers. Given how security-conscious he was, it wasn’t easy. You can imagine. But we had a spot of luck, you might say, and what we soon realized was that one computer must have been stolen.”
“I suspected as much,” she said. “Damn it!”
“Wait, I haven’t finished. We also understood that a number of machines had been connected to each other, and that occasionally these had been connected to a supercomputer in Tokyo.”
“That sounds feasible.”
“We can confirm that a large file, or at least something big, had recently been deleted, although we haven’t been able to restore it.”
“Are you suggesting Frans might have destroyed his own research?”
“I don’t want to jump to any conclusions. But it occurred to me while you were telling me all this.”
“Don’t you think the perpetrator might have deleted it?”
“You mean that he first copied it, and then removed it from Balder’s computers?”
“Yes.”
“I find that hard to believe. The killer was only in the house for a very short while, he would never have had time—let alone the ability—to do anything like that.”
“OK, that sounds reassuring, despite everything,” Sharif said doubtfully. “It’s just that…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think it fits with Frans’s character. Would he really destroy the greatest thing he’d ever done? That would be like…I don’t know…chopping off his own arm, or even worse, killing a friend, destroying a life.”
“Sometimes one has to make a big sacrifice,” Bublanski said thoughtfully. “Destroy what one loves.”
“Or else there’s a copy somewhere.”
“Or else there’s a copy somewhere,” he repeated. Suddenly he did something strange: he reached out his hand.
Farah Sharif did not understand. She looked at the hand as if she were expecting him to give her something. But Bublanski decided not to let himself be discouraged.
“Do you know what my rabbi says? That the mark of a man is his contradictions. We can long to be away and at home, both at the same time. I never knew Professor Balder, and he might have thought that I was just an old fool. But I do know one thing: we can both love and fear our work, just as Balder seems to have both loved and run away from his son. To be alive, Professor Sharif, means not being completely consistent. It means venturing out in many directions all at the same time, and I wonder if your friend didn’t find himself in the throes of some sort of upheaval. Maybe he really did destroy his life’s work. Maybe he revealed himself with all his inherent contradictions towards the end, and became a true human being in the best sense of the word.”
“Do you think so?”
“We may never know. But he had changed, hadn’t he? The custody hearing declared him unfit to look after his own son, yet that’s precisely what he did. He even got the boy to blossom and begin to draw.”
“That’s true, Chief Inspector.”
“Call me Jan. People sometimes even call me Officer Bubble.”
“Is that because you’re so bubbly?”
“No, I don’t think so somehow. But I do know one thing for sure.”
“And what’s that?”
“That you’re…”
He got no further, but he did not need to. Farah Sharif gave him a smile which in all its simplicity restored Bublanski’s belief in life and in God.
—
At 8:00 a.m. Salander got out of her
bed on Fiskargatan. Once again she had not managed to get much sleep, not only because she had been working on the encrypted NSA file without getting anywhere at all. She had also been listening for the sound of footsteps on the stairs and every now and then she checked her alarm and the surveillance camera on the landing.
She was no wiser than anyone else as to whether her sister had left the country. After her humiliation on Ingarö, it was by no means impossible that Camilla was preparing a new attack, with even greater force. The NSA could also, at any moment, march into the apartment. Salander was under no illusions on either point. But this morning she dismissed all that. She went to the bathroom with resolute steps and took off her top to check her bullet wound. She thought it was finally beginning to look better, and in a mad moment she decided to take herself off to the boxing club on Hornsgatan for a session.
To drive out pain with pain.
—
Afterwards she was sitting exhausted in the changing room, with hardly the energy to think. Her mobile buzzed. She ignored it. She went into the shower and let the warm water sprinkle over her. Gradually her thoughts cleared, and August’s drawing reappeared in her mind. But this time it wasn’t the illustration of the murderer which caught her attention—it was something at the bottom of the paper.
Salander had only a very brief glimpse of the finished work at the summer house on Ingarö; at the time she had been concentrating on sending it to Bublanski and Modig. If she had given it any thought at all, then like everyone else she would have been fascinated by the detailed rendering. But now her photographic memory focused on the equation August had written at the bottom of the page, and she stepped out of the shower deep in thought. The only thing was, she could hardly hear herself think. Obinze was raising hell outside the changing room.
“Shut up,” she shouted back. “I’m thinking!”
But that did not help much. Obinze was absolutely furious, and anyone other than Salander would understand why. Obinze had been shocked at how weak and half-hearted her effort at the punchbag was, and had worried when she began to hang her head and grimace in pain. In the end he had surprised her by rushing over and rolling up the sleeve of her T-shirt, only to discover the bullet wound. He had gone crazy, and evidently hadn’t calmed down yet.
“You’re an idiot, do you know that? A lunatic!” he shouted.
She was too tired to answer. Her strength deserted her completely, and what she had remembered from the drawing now faded from her mind. She sank down on the bench in the changing room next to Jamila Achebe. She used to both box and sleep with Jamila, usually in that order. When they fought their toughest bouts it often seemed like one long, wild foreplay. On a few occasions their behaviour in the shower had not been entirely decent. Neither of them set much store by etiquette.
“I actually agree with that noisy bastard out there. You’re not right in the head,” said Jamila.
“Maybe,” Salander answered.
“That wound looks nasty.”
“It’s healing.”
“But you needed to box?”
“Apparently.”
“Shall we go back to my place?”
Salander did not answer. Her phone was buzzing again in her black bag. Three text messages with the same content from a withheld number. As she read them she balled up her fists and looked lethal. Jamila decided it might be better to have sex with Salander another day instead.
—
Blomkvist had woken at 6:00 with some great ideas for the article, and on his way to the office the draft came together in his mind with no effort at all. He worked in deep concentration at the magazine and barely noticed what was going on around him, although sometimes he surfaced with thoughts of Zander.
He refused to give up hope, but he feared that Zander had given his life for the story, and he did what he could to honour his colleague with every sentence he wrote. On one level he intended the report to be a murder story about Frans and August Balder—an account of an eight-year-old autistic boy who sees his father shot, and who despite his disability finds a way of striking back. But on another level Blomkvist wanted it to be an instructive narrative about a new world of surveillance and espionage, where the boundaries between the legal and the criminal have been erased. The words came pouring out, but still it was not without its difficulties.
Through an old police contact he had gotten hold of the paperwork on the unsolved murder of Kajsa Falk, the girlfriend of one of the leading figures in Svavelsjö MC. The killer had never been identified and none of the people questioned during the investigation had been willing to contribute anything of value, but Blomkvist nevertheless gathered that a violent rift had torn apart the motorcycle club and that there was an insidious fear among the gang members of a “Lady Zala,” as one of the witnesses put it.
Despite considerable efforts, the police had not managed to discover who or what the name referred to. But there was not the slightest doubt in Blomkvist’s mind that “Lady Zala” was Camilla and that she was behind a whole series of other crimes, both in Sweden and abroad. It was not easy to find any evidence, though, and that exasperated him. For the time being he referred to her in the article by her codename Thanos.
Yet the biggest challenge was not Camilla or her shadowy connections to the Russian Duma. What bothered Blomkvist most was that he knew Needham would never have come all the way to Sweden and leaked top secret information if he were not bent on hiding something even bigger. Needham was no fool, and he knew that Blomkvist was not stupid either. He had therefore avoided making any part of his account too pretty.
On the contrary, he painted a fairly dreadful picture of the NSA. And yet…a closer inspection of the information told Blomkvist that, all in all, Needham was describing an intelligence agency which both functioned well and behaved reasonably decently, if you ignored the revolting bunch of criminals in the department known as Protection of Strategic Technologies—as it happens the self-same department which had prevented Needham from nailing his hacker.
The American must have wanted to do serious harm to a few specific colleagues, but rather than sink the whole of his organization, he preferred to give it a softer landing in an already inevitable crash. So Blomkvist was not especially surprised or angry when Berger appeared behind him and handed him a TT telegram with a worried expression.
“Does this scupper our story?” she said.
The telegram read:
TWO SENIOR EXECUTIVES AT THE NSA, JACOB BARCLAY AND BRIAN ABBOT, HAVE BEEN ARRESTED ON SUSPICION OF SERIOUS FINANCIAL MISCONDUCT AND ARE ON INDEFINITE LEAVE AWAITING TRIAL.
“THIS IS A BLOT ON THE REPUTATION OF OUR ORGANIZATION AND WE HAVE SPARED NO EFFORT IN TACKLING THE ISSUES AND HOLDING THOSE GUILTY TO ACCOUNT. ANYONE WORKING FOR THE NSA MUST HAVE THE HIGHEST ETHICAL STANDARDS AND WE UNDERTAKE TO BE AS TRANSPARENT DURING THE JUDICIAL PROCESS AS WE CAN, WHILE REMAINING SENSITIVE TO OUR NATIONAL SECURITY INTERESTS,” NSA CHIEF ADMIRAL CHARLES O’CONNOR HAS TOLD AP.
The telegram did not contain very much apart from the long quote; it said nothing about Balder’s murder and nothing that could be linked to the events in Stockholm. But Blomkvist understood what Berger meant. Now that the news was out, the Washington Post and the New York Times and a whole pack of serious American journalists would descend on the story, and it would be impossible to anticipate what they might dig up.
“Not good,” he said calmly. “But not a surprise.”
“Really?”
“It’s part of the same strategy that led the NSA to seek me out: damage control. They want to take back the initiative.”
“How do you mean?”
“There’s a reason why they leaked this to me. I could tell right away that there was something odd about it. Why did Needham insist on coming to talk to me here in Stockholm, and at five in the morning?”
“You think his actions were sanctioned higher up?”
“I suspected it, but at first I didn’t get what he was doing. It just felt off. Th
en I talked to Salander.”
“And that clarified things?”
“I realized that Needham knew exactly what she’d dug up during her hacker attack, and he had every reason to fear that I would learn all about it. He wanted to limit the damage. I suspect he gave me just enough to keep me happy and let me have my scoop and to prevent me from digging any deeper.”
“He’s in for a disappointment, then.”
“Let’s at least hope so. But I can’t see how to break through. The NSA is a closed door.”
“Even for an old bloodhound like Mikael Blomkvist?”
“Even for him.”
CHAPTER 30
NOVEMBER 25
The text message had said
The message was evidently from Camilla, but it added nothing to what Salander already knew. The events on Ingarö had only deepened the old hatred—she was certain Camilla would come after her again, after having gotten so close.
It was not the wording of the texts that upset Salander so much as the thoughts it brought to mind, the memory of what she had seen on the steep rock slope in the early-morning light when she and August had crouched on the narrow ledge, gunfire rattling above them. August had not been wearing a jacket or shoes and was shivering violently in the falling snow as the seconds went by. Salander realized how desperately compromised their situation was. She had a child to take care of and a pathetic pistol for a weapon, while the bastards up there had assault rifles. She had to take them by surprise, otherwise she and August would be slaughtered like lambs. She listened to the men’s footsteps and the direction they were shooting in, even their breathing and the rustle of their clothes.
But the strange thing was, when she finally saw her chance, she hesitated. Crucial moments went by as she broke a small twig into pieces on the rock ledge in front of them. Only then did she spring to her feet right in front of the men and, taking advantage of that brief millisecond of surprise, she fired two, three times. From experience she knew that moments like these burn an indelible impression on your mind, as if not only your body and muscles are sharpened, but also your perception.
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