The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle

by Stieg Larsson

  She was going to have to have a talk with him.

  Berger spent the evening not on her sofa watching TV, but in the ER at Nacka hospital. The shard of glass had penetrated so deeply that the bleeding would not stop. It turned out that one piece had broken off and was still in her heel, and would have to be removed. She was given a local anaesthetic and the wound was sewn up with three stitches.

  Berger cursed the whole time she was at the hospital, and she kept trying to call her husband or Blomkvist. Neither chose to answer the phone. By 10:00 she had her foot wrapped in a thick bandage. She was given crutches and took a taxi home.

  She spent a while limping around the living room, sweeping up the floor. She called Emergency Glass to order a new window. She was in luck. It had been a quiet evening and they arrived within twenty minutes. But the living-room window was so big that they did not have the glass in stock. The glazier offered to board up the window with plywood for the time being, and she accepted gratefully.

  As the plywood was being put up, she called the duty officer at Nacka Integrated Protection and asked why the hell their expensive burglar alarm had not gone off when someone threw a brick through her biggest window.

  Someone from NIP came out to look at the damage. It turned out that whoever had installed the alarm several years before had neglected to connect the leads from the windows in the living room.

  Berger was furious.

  The man from NIP said they would fix it first thing in the morning. Berger told him not to bother. Instead she called the duty officer at Milton Security and explained her situation. She said that she wanted to have a complete alarm package installed the next morning. “I know I have to sign a contract, but tell Armansky that Erika Berger called and make damn sure someone comes around in the morning.”

  Then, finally, she called the police. She was told that there was no car available to come and take her statement. She was advised to contact her local station in the morning. Thank you. Fuck off.

  Then she sat and fumed for a long time until her adrenaline level dropped, and it began to sink in that she was going to have to sleep alone in a house without an alarm while somebody was running around the neighbourhood calling her a whore and smashing her windows.

  She wondered whether she ought to go into the city to spend the night at a hotel, but Berger was not the kind of person who liked to be threatened. And she liked giving in to threats even less.

  But she did take some elementary safety precautions.

  Blomkvist had told her once how Salander had put paid to the serial killer Martin Vanger with a golf club. So she went to the garage and spent several minutes looking for her golf bag, which she had hardly even thought about for fifteen years. She chose an iron that she thought had a certain heft to it and laid it within easy reach of her bed. She left a putter in the hall and an 8-iron in the kitchen. She took a hammer from the tool box in the basement and put that in the master bathroom.

  She put the canister of Mace from her shoulder bag on her bedside table. Finally she found a rubber doorstop and wedged it under the bedroom door. And then she almost hoped that the moron who had called her a whore and destroyed her window would be stupid enough to come back that night.

  By the time she felt sufficiently entrenched it was 1:00. She had to be at SMP at 8:00. She checked her calendar and saw that she had four meetings, the first at 10:00. Her foot was aching badly. She undressed and crept into bed.

  Then, inevitably, she lay awake and worried.

  Whore.

  She had received nine emails, all of which had contained the word whore, and they all seemed to come from sources in the media. The first had come from her own newsroom, but the source was a fake.

  She got out of bed and took out the new Dell laptop that she had been given when she had started at SMP.

  The first email—which was also the most crude and intimidating, with its suggestion that she would be fucked with a screwdriver—had come on May 16, a couple of weeks ago.

  Email number two had arrived two days later, on May 18.

  Then a week went by before the emails started coming again, now at intervals of about twenty-four hours. Then the attack on her home. Again, whore.

  During that time Carlsson on the culture pages had received an ugly email purportedly sent by Berger. And if Carlsson had received an email like that, it was entirely possible that the emailer had been busy elsewhere too—that other people had gotten mail apparently from her that she did not know about.

  It was an unpleasant thought.

  The most disturbing was the attack on her house.

  Someone had taken the trouble to find out where she lived, drive out here, and throw a brick through the window. It was obviously premeditated—the attacker had brought his can of spray paint. The next moment she froze when she realized that she could add another attack to the list. All four of her tyres had been slashed when she spent the night with Blomkvist at the Slussen Hilton.

  The conclusion was just as unpleasant as it was obvious. She was being stalked.

  Someone, for some unknown reason, had decided to harass her.

  The fact that her home had been subject to an attack was understandable—it was where it was and impossible to disguise. But if her car had been damaged on some random street in Södermalm, her stalker must have been somewhere nearby when she parked it. He must have been following her.

  CHAPTER 18

  Thursday, June 2

  Berger’s mobile was ringing. It was 9:05.

  “Good morning, Fru Berger. Dragan Armansky. I understand you called last night.”

  Berger explained what had happened and asked whether Milton Security could take over the contract from Nacka Integrated Protection.

  “We can certainly install an alarm that will work,” Armansky said. “The problem is that the closest car we have at night is in Nacka centre. Response time would be about thirty minutes. If we took the job I’d have to subcontract out your house. We have an agreement with a local security company, Adam Security in Fisksätra, which has a response time of ten minutes if all goes as it should.”

  “That would be an improvement over NIP, which doesn’t bother to turn up at all.”

  “Adam Security is a family-owned business, a father, two sons, and a couple of cousins. Greeks, good people. I’ve known the father for many years. They handle coverage about three hundred twenty days a year. They tell us in advance the days they aren’t available because of holidays or something else, and then our car in Nacka takes over.”

  “That works for me.”

  “I’ll be sending a man out this morning. His name is David Rosin, and in fact he’s already on his way. He’s going to do a security assessment. He needs your keys if you’re not going to be home, and he needs your authorization to do a thorough examination of your house, from top to bottom. He’s going to take pictures of the entire property and the immediate surroundings.”

  “All right.”

  “Rosin has a lot of experience, and we’ll make you a proposal. We’ll have a complete security plan ready in a few days, which will include a personal attack alarm, fire security, evacuation plan, and break-in protection.”

  “OK.”

  “If anything should happen, we also want you to know what to do in the ten minutes before the car arrives from Fisksätra.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “We’ll install the alarm this afternoon. Then we’ll have to sign a contract.”

  Only after she had finished her conversation with Armansky did Berger realize that she had overslept. She called Fredriksson and explained that she had hurt herself. He would have to cancel the 10:00.

  “What’s happened?” he said.

  “I cut my foot,” Berger said. “I’ll hobble in as soon as I’ve pulled myself together.”

  She used the toilet in the master bathroom and then pulled on some black pants and borrowed one of Greger’s slippers for her injured foot. She chose a black blouse and put on
a jacket. Before she removed the doorstop from the bedroom door, she armed herself with the canister of Mace.

  She made her way cautiously through the house and switched on the coffeemaker. She had her breakfast at the kitchen table, listening for sounds in the vicinity. She had just poured a second cup of coffee when there was a firm knock on the front door. It was David Rosin from Milton Security.

  Figuerola walked to Bergsgatan and summoned her four colleagues for an early morning conference.

  “We have a deadline now,” she said. “Our work has to be done by July 13, the day the Salander trial begins. We have just under six weeks. Let’s agree on what’s most important right now. Who wants to go first?”

  Berglund cleared his throat. “The blond man with Mårtensson. Who is he?”

  “We have photographs, but no idea how to find him. We can’t put out an APB.”

  “What about Gullberg, then? There must be a story to track down there. We have him in the Security Police from the early fifties to 1964, when SIS was founded. Then he vanishes.”

  Figuerola nodded.

  “Should we conclude that the Zalachenko club was an association formed in 1964? That would be some time before Zalachenko even came to Sweden.”

  “There must have been some other purpose … a secret organization within the organization.”

  “That was after Stig Wennerström. Everyone was paranoid.”

  “A sort of secret spy police?”

  “There are in fact parallels overseas. In the States a special group of internal spy chasers was created within the CIA in the fifties. It was led by a James Jesus Angleton, and it very nearly sabotaged the entire CIA. Angleton’s gang were as fanatical as they were paranoid—they suspected everyone in the CIA of being a Russian agent. As a result, the agency’s effectiveness in large areas was paralysed.”

  “But that’s all speculation …”

  “Where are the old personnel files kept?”

  “Gullberg isn’t in them. I’ve checked.”

  “But what about a budget? An operation like this has to be financed.”

  The discussion went on until lunchtime, when Figuerola excused herself and went to the gym for some peace, to think things over.

  Berger did not arrive in the newsroom until lunchtime. Her foot was hurting so badly that she could not put any weight on it. She hobbled over to her glass cage and sank into her chair with relief. Fredriksson looked up from his desk, and she waved him in.

  “What happened?” he said.

  “I stepped on a piece of glass and a shard lodged in my heel.”

  “That … wasn’t so good.”

  “No. It wasn’t good. Peter, has anyone received any more weird emails?”

  “Not that I’ve heard.”

  “Keep your ears open. I want to know if anything odd happens around SMP.”

  “What sort of odd?”

  “I’m afraid some idiot is sending really vile emails and he seems to have targeted me. So I want to know if you hear of anything going on.”

  “The type of email Eva Carlsson got?”

  “Right, but anything strange at all. I’ve had a whole string of crazy emails accusing me of being all kinds of things—and suggesting various perverse things that ought to be done to me.”

  Fredriksson’s expression darkened. “How long has this been going on?”

  “A couple of weeks. Keep your eyes peeled. … So tell me, what’s going to be in the paper tomorrow?”

  “Well …”

  “Well, what?”

  “Holm and the head of the legal section are on the warpath.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because of Frisk. You extended his contract and gave him a feature assignment. And he won’t tell anybody what it’s about.”

  “He is forbidden to talk about it. My orders.”

  “That’s what he says. Which means that Holm and the legal editor are up in arms.”

  “I can see that they might be. Set up a meeting with Legal at 3:00. I’ll explain the situation.”

  “Holm is not pleased—”

  “I’m not pleased with Holm, either, so we’re even.”

  “He’s so upset that he’s complained to the board.”

  Berger looked up. Damn it. I’m going to have to face up to the Borgsjö problem.

  “Borgsjö is coming in this afternoon and wants a meeting with you. I suspect it’s Holm’s doing.”

  “What time?”

  “Two o’clock,” said Fredriksson, and he went back to his desk to write the midday memo.

  Jonasson visited Salander during her lunch. She pushed away a plate of the hospital’s vegetable stew. As always, he did a brief examination of her, but she noticed that he was no longer putting much effort into it.

  “You’ve recovered nicely,” he said.

  “Hmm. You’ll have to do something about the food at this place.”

  “What about it?”

  “Couldn’t you get me a pizza?”

  “Sorry. Way beyond the budget.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Lisbeth, we’re going to have a discussion about the state of your health tomorrow—”

  “Understood. And I’ve recovered nicely.”

  “You’re now well enough to be moved to Kronoberg prison. I might be able to postpone the move for another week, but my colleagues are going to start wondering.”

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded. “I’m ready. And it had to happen sooner or later.”

  “I’ll give the go-ahead tomorrow, then,” Jonasson said. “You’ll probably be transferred pretty soon.”

  She nodded.

  “It might be as early as this weekend. The hospital administration doesn’t want you here.”

  “Who could blame them.”

  “Er … that device of yours—”

  “I’ll leave it in the recess behind the table here.” She pointed.

  “Good idea.”

  They sat in silence for a moment before Jonasson stood up.

  “I have to check on my other patients.”

  “Thanks for everything. I owe you one.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  “No. You’ve done a great deal more. I won’t forget it.”

  Blomkvist entered police headquarters on Kungsholmen through the entrance on Polhemsgatan. Figuerola accompanied him up to the offices of the Constitutional Protection Unit. They exchanged only silent glances in the elevator.

  “Do you think it’s such a good idea for me to be hanging around at police HQ?” Blomkvist said. “Someone might see us together and start to wonder.”

  “This will be our only meeting here. From now on we’ll meet in an office we’ve rented at Fridhemsplan. We get access tomorrow. But this will be OK. Constitutional Protection is a small and more or less self-sufficient unit, and nobody else at SIS cares about it. And we’re on a different floor from the rest of Säpo.”

  He greeted Edklinth without shaking hands and said hello to two colleagues who were apparently part of his team. They introduced themselves only as Stefan and Anders. He smiled to himself.

  “Where do we start?” he said.

  “We could start by having some coffee. … Monica?” Edklinth said.

  “Thanks, that would be nice,” Figuerola said.

  Edklinth had probably meant for her to serve the coffee. Blomkvist noticed that the chief of the Constitutional Protection Unit hesitated for only a second before he got up and brought the coffee over to the conference table, where place settings were already laid out. Blomkvist saw that Edklinth was also smiling to himself, which he took to be a good sign. Then Edklinth turned serious.

  “I honestly don’t know how I should be managing this. It must be the first time a journalist has sat in on a meeting of the Security Police. The issues we’ll be discussing now are in many respects confidential and highly classified.”

  “I’m not
interested in military secrets. I’m only interested in the Zalachenko club.”

  “But we have to strike a balance. First of all, the names of today’s participants must not be mentioned in your articles.”

  “Agreed.”

  Edklinth gave Blomkvist a look of surprise.

  “Second, you may not speak with anyone but me and Monica Figuerola. We’re the ones who will decide what we can tell you.”

  “If you have a long list of requirements, you should have mentioned them yesterday.”

  “Yesterday I hadn’t yet thought through the matter.”

  “Then I have something to tell you too. This is probably the first and only time in my professional career that I will reveal the contents of an unpublished story to a police officer. So, to quote you, I honestly don’t know how I should be managing this.”

  A brief silence settled over the table.

  “Maybe we—”

  “What if we—”

  Edklinth and Figuerola had started talking at the same time before falling silent.

  “My target is the Zalachenko club,” Blomkvist said. “You want to bring charges against the Zalachenko club. Let’s stick to that.”

  Edklinth nodded.

  “So, what do you have?” Blomkvist said.

  Edklinth explained what Figuerola and her team had unearthed. He showed Blomkvist the photograph of Evert Gullberg with Colonel Wennerström.

  “Good. I’ll take a copy of that.”

  “It’s in Åhlén and Åkerlund’s archive,” Figuerola said.

  “It’s on the table in front of me. With a note on the back,” Blomkvist said.

  “Give him a copy,” Edklinth said.

  “That means that Zalachenko was murdered by the Section.”

  “Murder, coupled with the suicide of a man who was dying of cancer. Gullberg’s still alive, but the doctors don’t give him more than a few weeks. After his suicide attempt he sustained such severe brain damage that he is for all intents and purposes a vegetable.”

  “And he was the person with primary responsibility for Zalachenko when he defected.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Gullberg met Prime Minister Fälldin six weeks after Zalachenko’s defection.”