He listened. Someone was moving around. Holding the pistol in front of him, he lifted the crossbar with his left hand, pulled open the door, and was confronted by a pair of terrified eyes in a blood-streaked face. He saw the axe on the floor.
“Holy shit,” he said.
Then he saw the prosthesis.
Zalachenko.
Salander had definitely paid him a visit, but Blomkvist couldn’t imagine what must have happened. He closed the door and replaced the crossbar.
With Zalachenko in the woodshed and Niedermann bound hand and foot beside the road to Sollebrunn, Blomkvist hurried across the courtyard to the farmhouse. It was possible that there was a third person who might yet be a danger, but the house seemed unoccupied, almost abandoned. Pointing his gun at the ground, he eased open the front door. He came into a dark hall and saw a rectangle of light from the kitchen. The only sound was the ticking of a wall clock. When he reached the door he saw Salander lying on the kitchen bench.
For a moment he stood as if petrified, staring at her mangled body. He noticed that she was holding a pistol in her hand, which hung loosely off the edge of the bench. He went to her side and sank to his knees. He thought about how he had found Svensson and Johansson and thought that she was dead too. Then he saw a slight movement in her chest and heard a feeble, wheezing breath.
He reached out his hand and carefully loosened the gun from her grip. Suddenly her fist tightened around its butt. She opened her eyes to two narrow slits and stared at him for many long seconds. Her eyes were unfocused. Then he heard her mutter in such a low voice that he could only with difficulty catch the words.
Kalle Fucking Blomkvist.
She closed her eyes and let go of the gun. He put it on the floor, took out his mobile, and dialled the number for emergency services.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Translation copyright © 2009 by Reg Keeland
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com
Originally published in Sweden in slightly different form as Luftslottet Som Sprängdes by Norstedts, Stockholm, in 2007. Copyright © 2007 by Norstedts Agency. This translation originally published in Great Britain by MacLehose Press, an imprint of Quercus, London, in 2009, with agreement of Norstedts Agency. Published by arrangement with Quercus Publishing PLC (UK).
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Larsson, Stieg, 1954–2004.
[Luftslottet som sprängdes. English]
The girl who kicked the hornet’s nest / by Stieg Larsson ; translated from the
Swedish by Reg Keeland.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
Originally published in Sweden as Luftslottet som sprängdes by Norstedts,
Stockholm, in 2007.
Sequel to: The girl who played with fire.
eISBN: 978-0-307-59367-2
1. Political corruption—Sweden—Fiction. 2. Revenge—Fiction.
I. Keeland, Reg, 1943– II. Title.
PT9876.22.A6933L8413 2010
839.738—dc22 2010006361
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design by Peter Mendelsund
v3.0_r2
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Part 1 - Intermezzo in a Corridor
Chapter 1 - Friday, April 8
Chapter 2 - Friday, April 8
Chapter 3 - Friday, April 8–Saturday, April 9
Chapter 4 - Saturday, April 9–Sunday, April 10
Chapter 5 - Sunday, April 10
Chapter 6 - Monday, April 11
Chapter 7 - Monday, April 11–Tuesday, April 12
Part 2 - Hacker Republic
Chapter 8 - Sunday, May 1–Monday, May 2
Chapter 9 - Wednesday, May 4
Chapter 10 - Saturday, May 7–Thursday, May 12
Chapter 11 - Friday, May 13–Saturday, May 14
Chapter 12 - Sunday, May 15–Monday, May 16
Chapter 13 - Tuesday, May 17
Chapter 14 - Wednesday, May 18
Chapter 15 - Thursday, May 19–Sunday, May 22
Part 3 - Disk Crash
Chapter 16 - Friday, May 27–Tuesday, May 31
Chapter 17 - Wednesday, June 1
Chapter 18 - Thursday, June 2
Chapter 19 - Friday, June 3–Saturday, June 4
Chapter 20 - Saturday, June 4
Chapter 21 - Saturday, June 4–Monday, June 6
Chapter 22 - Monday, June 6
Part 4 - Rebooting System
Chapter 23 - Friday, July 1–Sunday, July 10
Chapter 24 - Monday, July 11
Chapter 25 - Wednesday, July 13–Thursday, July 14
Chapter 26 - Friday, July 15
Chapter 27 - Friday, July 15
Chapter 28 - Friday, July 15–Saturday, July 16
Chapter 29 - Saturday, July 16–Friday, October 7
Epilogue: Inventory of Estate: Friday, December 2–Sunday, December 18
Notes
A Note About the Author
PART 1
Intermezzo in a Corridor
APRIL 8–12
An estimated 600 women served during the American Civil War. They had signed up disguised as men. Hollywood has missed a significant chapter of cultural history here—or is this history ideologically too difficult to deal with? Historians have often struggled to deal with women who do not respect gender distinctions, and nowhere is that distinction more sharply drawn than in the question of armed combat. (Even today, it can cause controversy having a woman on a typical Swedish moose hunt.)
But from antiquity to modern times, there are many stories of female warriors, of Amazons. The best known find their way into the history books as warrior queens, rulers as well as leaders. They have been forced to act as any Churchill, Stalin, or Roosevelt: Semiramis from Nineveh, who shaped the Assyrian Empire, and Boudicca, who led one of the bloodiest English revolts against the Roman forces of occupation, to cite just two. Boudicca is honoured with a statue on the Thames at Westminster Bridge, opposite Big Ben. Be sure to say hello to her if you happen to pass by.
On the other hand, history is reticent about women who were common soldiers, who bore arms, belonged to regiments, and took part in battles on the same terms as men, though hardly a war has been waged without women soldiers in the ranks.
CHAPTER 1
Friday, April 8
Dr. Jonasson was woken by a nurse five minutes before the helicopter was expected to land. It was just before 1:30 in the morning.
“What?” he said, confused.
“Rescue Service helicopter coming in. Two patients. An injured man and a younger woman. The woman has gunshot wounds.”
“All right,” Jonasson said wearily.
Although he had slept for only half an hour, he felt groggy. He was on the night shift in the ER at Sahlgrenska hospital in Göteborg. It had been a strenuous evening.
By 12:30 the steady flow of emergency cases had eased off. He had made a round to check on the state of his patients and then gone back to the staff bedroom to try to rest for a while. He was on duty until 6:00, and seldom got the chance to sleep even if no emergency patients came in. But this time he had fallen asleep almost as soon as he turned out the light.
Jonasson saw lightning out over the sea. He knew that the helicopter was coming in the nick of time. All of a sudden a heavy downpour lashed at the window. The storm had moved in over Göteborg.
He heard the sound of the chopper and watched as it banked through the storm squalls down towards the helipad. For
a second he held his breath when the pilot seemed to have difficulty controlling the aircraft. Then it vanished from his field of vision and he heard the engine slowing to land. He took a hasty swallow of his tea and set down the cup.
Jonasson met the emergency team in the admissions area. The other doctor on duty took on the first patient who was wheeled in—an elderly man with his head bandaged, apparently with a serious wound to the face. Jonasson was left with the second patient, the woman who had been shot. He did a quick visual examination: it looked like she was a teenager, very dirty and bloody, and severely wounded. He lifted the blanket that the Rescue Service had wrapped around her body and saw that the wounds to her hip and shoulder were bandaged with duct tape, which he considered a pretty clever idea. The tape kept bacteria out and blood in. One bullet had entered her hip and gone straight through the muscle tissue. He gently raised her shoulder and located the entry wound in her back. There was no exit wound: the round was still inside her shoulder. He hoped it had not penetrated her lung, and since he did not see any blood in the woman’s mouth he concluded that probably it had not.
“Radiology,” he told the nurse in attendance. That was all he needed to say.
Then he cut away the bandage that the emergency team had wrapped around her skull. He froze when he saw another entry wound. The woman had been shot in the head, and there was no exit wound there either.
Jonasson paused for a second, looking down at the girl. He felt dejected. He often described his job as being like that of a goalkeeper. Every day people came to his place of work in varying conditions but with one objective: to get help.
Jonasson was the goalkeeper who stood between the patient and Fonus Funeral Service. His job was to decide what to do. If he made the wrong decision, the patient might die or perhaps wake up disabled for life. Most often he made the right decision, because the vast majority of injured people had an obvious and specific problem. A stab wound to the lung or a crushing injury after a car crash were both particular and recognizable problems that could be dealt with. The survival of the patient depended on the extent of the damage and on Jonasson’s skill.
There were two kinds of injury that he hated. One was a serious burn case, because no matter what measures he took the burns would almost inevitably result in a lifetime of suffering. The second was an injury to the brain.
The girl on the gurney could live with a piece of lead in her hip and a piece of lead in her shoulder. But a piece of lead inside her brain was a trauma of a wholly different magnitude. He was suddenly aware of the nurse saying something.
“Sorry. I wasn’t listening.”
“It’s her.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s Lisbeth Salander. The girl they’ve been hunting for the past few weeks, for the triple murder in Stockholm.”
Jonasson looked again at the unconscious patient’s face. He realized at once that the nurse was right. He and the whole of Sweden had seen Salander’s passport photograph on billboards outside every newspaper kiosk for weeks. And now the murderer herself had been shot, which was surely poetic justice of a sort.
But that was not his concern. His job was to save his patient’s life, irrespective of whether she was a triple murderer or a Nobel Prize winner. Or both.
Then the efficient chaos, the same in every ER the world over, erupted. The staff on Jonasson’s shift set about their appointed tasks. Salander’s clothes were cut away. A nurse reported on her blood pressure—100/70—while the doctor put his stethoscope to her chest and listened to her heartbeat. It was surprisingly regular, but her breathing was not quite normal.
Jonasson did not hesitate to classify Salander’s condition as critical. The wounds in her shoulder and hip could wait until later, with a compress on each, or even with the duct tape that some inspired soul had applied. What mattered was her head. Jonasson ordered tomography with the new and improved CT scanner that the hospital had lately acquired.
Jonasson had a view of medicine that was at times unorthodox. He thought doctors often drew conclusions that they could not substantiate. This meant that they gave up far too easily; alternatively, they spent too much time at the acute stage trying to work out exactly what was wrong with the patient so as to decide on the right treatment. This was correct procedure, of course. The problem was that the patient was in danger of dying while the doctor was still doing his thinking.
But Jonasson had never before had a patient with a bullet in her skull. Most likely he would need a brain surgeon. He had all the theoretical knowledge required to make an incursion into the brain, but he did not by any means consider himself a brain surgeon. He felt inadequate, but all of a sudden he realized that he might be luckier than he deserved. Before he scrubbed up and put on his operating clothes he sent for the nurse.
“There’s an American professor from Boston working at the Karolinska hospital in Stockholm. He happens to be in Göteborg tonight, staying at the Elite Park Avenue on Avenyn. He just gave a lecture on brain research. He’s a good friend of mine. Could you get the number?”
While Jonasson was still waiting for the X-rays, the nurse came back with the number of the Elite Park Avenue. Jonasson picked up the phone. The night porter at the Elite Park Avenue was very reluctant to wake a guest at that time of night and Jonasson had to come up with a few choice phrases about the critical nature of the situation before his call was put through.
“Good morning, Frank,” Jonasson said when the call was finally answered. “It’s Anders. Do you feel like coming over to Sahlgrenska to help out in a brain op?”
“Are you bullshitting me?” Dr. Frank Ellis had lived in Sweden for many years and was fluent in Swedish—albeit with an American accent—but when Jonasson spoke to him in Swedish, Ellis always replied in his mother tongue.
“The patient is in her mid-twenties. Entry wound, no exit.”
“And she’s alive?”
“Weak but regular pulse, less regular breathing, blood pressure one hundred over seventy. She also has a bullet wound in her shoulder and another in her hip. But I know how to handle those two.”
“Sounds promising,” Ellis said.
“Promising?”
“If somebody has a bullet in their head and they’re still alive, that points to hopeful.”
“I understand. … Frank, can you help me out?”
“I spent the evening in the company of good friends, Anders. I got to bed at 1:00 and no doubt I have an impressive blood alcohol content.”
“I’ll make the decisions and do the surgery. But I need somebody to tell me if I’m doing anything stupid. Even a falling-down drunk Professor Ellis is several classes better than I could ever be when it comes to assessing brain damage.”
“OK, I’ll come. But you’re going to owe me one.”
“I’ll have a taxi waiting outside by the time you get down to the lobby. The driver will know where to drop you, and a nurse will be there to meet you and get you scrubbed in.”
“I had a patient a number of years ago, in Boston—I wrote about the case in the New England Journal of Medicine. It was a girl the same age as your patient here. She was walking to the university when someone shot her with a crossbow. The arrow entered at the outside edge of her left eyebrow and went straight through her head, exiting from almost the middle of the back of her neck.”
“And she survived?”
“She looked like nothing on earth when she came in. We cut off the arrow shaft and put her head in a CT scanner. The arrow went straight through her brain. By all known reckoning she should have been dead, or at least suffered such massive trauma that she would have been in a coma.”
“And what was her condition?”
“She was conscious the whole time. Not only that; she was terribly frightened, of course, but she was completely rational. Her only problem was that she had an arrow through her skull.”
“What did you do?”
“Well, I got the forceps and pulled out the arrow and bandag
ed the wounds. More or less.”
“And she lived to tell the tale?”
“Obviously her condition was critical, but the fact is we could have sent her home the same day. I’ve seldom had a healthier patient.”
Jonasson wondered whether Ellis was pulling his leg.
“On the other hand,” Ellis went on, “I had a forty-two-year-old patient in Stockholm some years ago who banged his head on a windowsill. He began to feel sick immediately and was taken by ambulance to the ER. When I got to him he was unconscious. He had a small bump and a very slight bruise. But he never regained consciousness and died after nine days in intensive care. To this day I have no idea why he died. In the autopsy report, we wrote brain haemorrhage resulting from an accident, but not one of us was satisfied with that assessment. The bleeding was so minor, and located in an area that shouldn’t have affected anything else at all. And yet his liver, kidneys, heart, and lungs shut down one after the other. The older I get, the more I think it’s like a game of roulette. I don’t believe we’ll ever figure out precisely how the brain works.” He tapped on the X-ray with a pen. “What do you intend to do?”
“I was hoping you would tell me.”
“Let’s hear your diagnosis.”
“Well, first of all, it seems to be a small-calibre bullet. It entered at the temple, and then stopped about four centimetres into the brain. It’s resting against the lateral ventricle. There’s bleeding there.”
“How will you proceed?”
“To use your terminology, get some forceps and extract the bullet by the same route it went in.”
“Excellent idea. I would use the thinnest forceps you have.”
“It’s that simple?”
“What else can we do in this case? We could leave the bullet where it is, and she might live to be a hundred, but it’s also a risk. She might develop epilepsy, migraines, all sorts of complaints. And one thing you really don’t want to do is drill into her skull and then operate a year from now when the wound itself has healed. The bullet is located away from the major blood vessels. So I would recommend that you extract it, but …”
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