by Stieg Larsson
The colleague Berger seemed to have the most to do with was Fredriksson. His role was to act as a kind of shadow, to sit in on her meetings as an observer. He prepared memos, briefed Berger on various articles and issues, and got the jobs moving.
He emailed Berger a dozen times a day.
Salander sorted all of Fredriksson’s emails to Berger and read them through. In a number of instances he had objected to some decision Berger had made and presented counter-proposals. Berger seemed to have confidence in him since she would then often change her decision or accept his argument. He was never hostile. But there was not a hint of any personal relationship to her.
Salander closed Berger’s email and thought for a moment.
She opened Fredriksson’s account.
Plague had been fooling around with the home computers of various employees of SMP all evening without much success. He had managed to get into Holm’s machine because it had an open line to his desk at work; any time of the day or night he could go in and access whatever he was working on. Holm’s PC was one of the most boring Plague had ever hacked. He had no luck with the other seventeen names on Salander’s list. One reason was that none of the people he tried to hack was online on a Saturday night. He was beginning to tire of this impossible task when Salander pinged him at 10:30.
Plague sighed. This girl who had once been his student now had a better handle on things than he did.
• • •
Blomkvist was back at Salander’s apartment on Mosebacke just before midnight. He was tired. He took a shower and put on some coffee, and then he booted up Salander’s computer and pinged her ICQ.
Linder woke with a start when her earpiece beeped. Someone had just tripped the motion detector she had placed in the hall on the ground floor. She propped herself up on her elbow. It was 5:23 on Sunday morning. She slipped silently out of bed and pulled on her jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers. She stuffed the Mace in her back pocket and picked up her spring-loaded baton.
She passed the door to Berger’s bedroom without a sound, noticing that it was closed and therefore locked.
She stopped at the top of the stairs and listened. She heard a faint clinking sound and movement from the ground floor. Slowly she went down the stairs and paused in the hall to listen again.
A chair scraped in the kitchen. She held the baton in a firm grip and crept to the kitchen door. She saw a bald, unshaven man sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of orange juice, reading SMP. He sensed her presence and looked up.
“And who the hell are you?”
Linder relaxed and leaned against the door jamb. “Greger Beckman, I presume. Hello. I’m Susanne Linder.”
“I see. Are you going to hit me over the head or would you like a glass of juice?”
“Yes, please,” Linder said, putting down her baton. “Juice, that is.”
Beckman reached for a glass from the draining board and poured some for her.
“I work for Milton Security,” Linder said. “I think it’s probably best if your wife explains what I’m doing here.”
Beckman stood up. “Has something happened to Erika?”
“Your wife is fine. But there’s been some trouble. We tried to get ahold of you in Paris.”
“Paris? Why Paris? I’ve been in Helsinki, for God’s sake.”
“All right. I’m sorry, but your wife thought you were in Paris.”
“That’s next month,” said Beckman on his way out the door.
“The bedroom is locked. You need a code to open the door,” Linder said.
“I beg your pardon? What code?”
She told him the three numbers he had to punch in to open the bedroom door. He ran up the stairs.
At 10:00 on Sunday morning Jonasson came into Salander’s room.
“Hello, Lisbeth.”
“Hello.”
“Just thought I’d warn you: the police are coming at lunchtime.”
“Fine.”
“You don’t seem worried.”
“I’m not.”
“I have a present for you.”
“A present? What for?”
“You’ve been one of my most interesting patients in a long time.”
“You don’t say,” Salander said sceptically.
“I heard that you’re fascinated by DNA and genetics.”
“Who’s been gossiping? That psychologist lady, I bet.”
Jonasson nodded. “If you get bored in prison … this is the latest thing on DNA research.”
He handed her a brick of a book titled Spirals—Mysteries of DNA, by Professor Yoshito Takamura of Tokyo University. Salander opened it and studied the table of contents.
“Beautiful,” she said.
“Someday I’d be interested to hear how it is that you can read academic texts that even I can’t understand.”
As soon as Jonasson had left the room, she took out her Palm. Last chance. From SMP’s personnel department Salander had learned that Fredriksson had worked at the paper for six years. During that time he had been out sick for two extended periods: two months in 2003 and three months in 2004. From the personnel files she concluded that the reason in both instances was burnout. Berger’s predecessor Morander had on one occasion questioned whether Fredriksson should indeed stay on as assistant editor.
Yak, yak, yak. Nothing concrete to go on.
At 11:45 Plague pinged her.
Salander logged off from ICQ. She glanced at the clock and realized that it would soon be lunchtime. She rapidly composed a mes
sage that she addressed to the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]:
Mikael. Important. Call Berger right away and tell her Fredriksson is Poison Pen.
The instant she sent the message she heard movement in the corridor. She polished the screen of her Palm Tungsten T3, then switched it off and placed it in the recess behind the bedside table.
“Hello, Lisbeth.” It was Giannini in the doorway.
“Hello.”
“The police are coming for you in a while. I’ve brought you some clothes. I hope they’re the right size.”
Salander looked distrustfully at the selection of neat, dark-coloured linen pants and pastel blouses.
Two uniformed Göteborg policewomen came to get her. Giannini was to go with them to the prison.
As they walked from her room down the hall, Salander noticed that several members of the staff were watching her with curiosity. She gave them a friendly nod, and some of them waved back. As if by chance, Jonasson was standing by the reception desk. They looked at each other and nodded. Even before they had turned the corner, Salander noticed that he was heading for her room.
During the entire procedure of transporting her to the prison, Salander did not say a word to the police.
Blomkvist had closed his iBook at 7:00 on Sunday morning. He sat for a moment at Salander’s desk, listless, staring into space.
Then he went to her bedroom and looked at her gigantic king-size bed. After a while he went back to her office and flipped open his mobile to call Figuerola.
“Hi. It’s Mikael.”
“Hello there. Are you already up?”
“I’ve just finished working and I’m on my way to bed. I just wanted to call and say hello.”
“Men who just call to say hello generally have ulterior motives.”
He laughed.
“Blomkvist … you could come here and sleep if you like.”
“I’d be terrible company.”
“I’ll get used to it.”
He took a taxi to Pontonjärgatan.
Berger spent Sunday in bed with her husband. They lay there talking and dozing. In the afternoon they got dressed and went for a walk down to the steamship wharf.
“SMP was a mistake,” Berger said when they got home.
“Don’t say that. Right now it’s tough, but you knew it would be. Things will calm down after you’ve been there awhile.”
“It’s not the job. I can handle that. It’s the atmosphere.”
“I see.”
“I don’t like it there, but on the other hand, I can’t walk out after a few weeks.”
She sat at the kitchen table and stared morosely into space. Beckman had never seen his wife so stymied.
Inspector Faste met Salander for the first time at 12:30 on Sunday afternoon when a female police officer brought her into Erlander’s office at Göteborg police headquarters.
“You were difficult enough to catch,” Faste said.
Salander gave him a long look, satisfied herself that he was an idiot, and decided that she would not waste too many seconds concerning herself with his existence.
“Inspector Gunilla Wäring will accompany you to Stockholm,” Erlander said.
“All right,” Faste said. “Then we’ll leave at once. There are quite a few people who want to have a serious talk with you, Salander.”
Erlander said goodbye to her. She ignored him.
They had decided for simplicity’s sake to do the prisoner transfer to Stockholm by car. Wäring drove. At the start of the journey Hans Faste sat in the front passenger seat with his head turned towards the back as he tried to have some exchange with Salander. By the time they reached Alingsås his neck was aching and he gave up.
Salander looked at the countryside. In her mind Faste did not exist.
Teleborian was right. She’s fucking retarded, Faste thought. We’ll see about changing that attitude when we get to Stockholm.
Every so often he glanced at Salander and tried to form an opinion of the woman he had been desperate to track down for such a long time. Even he had some doubts when he saw the skinny girl. He wondered how much she could weigh. He reminded himself that she was a lesbian and consequently not a real woman.
But it was possible that the bit about Satanism was an exaggeration. She did not look the type.
The irony was that he would have preferred to arrest her for the three murders she was originally suspected of, but reality had caught up with his investigation. Even a skinny girl can handle a weapon. Instead she had been taken in for assaulting the top leadership of Svavelsjö MC, and she was guilty of that crime, no question. There was forensic evidence related to the incident, which she no doubt intended to refute.
Figuerola woke Blomkvist at 1:00 in the afternoon. She had been sitting on her balcony and had finished reading her book about the idea of God in antiquity, listening all the while to Blomkvist’s snores from the bedroom. It had been peaceful. When she went in to look at him it came to her, acutely, that she was more attracted to him than she had been to any other man in years.
It was a pleasant yet unsettling feeling. There he was, but he was not a stable element in her life.
They went down to Norr Mälarstrand for a coffee. Then she took him home and to bed for the rest of the afternoon. He left her at 7:00. She felt a vague sense of loss a moment after he kissed her cheek and was gone.
At 8:00 on Sunday evening Linder knocked on Berger’s door. She would not be sleeping there now that Beckman was home, and this visit was not connected with her job. But during the time she had spent at Berger’s house they had both grown to enjoy the long conversations they had in the kitchen. She had a great liking for Berger. She recognized in her a desperate woman who succeeded in concealing her true nature. She went to work apparently calm, but in reality she was a bundle of nerves.
Linder suspected that her anxiety was not solely due to Poison Pen. But Berger’s life and problems were none of her business. It was a friendly visit. She had come out here just to see Berger and to be sure that everything was all right. The couple were in the kitchen in a solemn mood. It seemed as though they had spent their Sunday working their way through one or two serious issues.
Beckman put on some coffee. Linder had been there only a few minutes when Berger’s mobile rang.
Berger had answered every call that day with a feeling of impending doom.
“Berger,” she said.
“Hello, Ricky.”
Blomkvist. Shit. I haven’t told him the Borgsjö file has disappeared.
“Hi, Micke.”
“Salander was moved to the prison in Göteborg this evening, to wait for transport to Stockholm tomorrow.”
“OK.”
“She sent you a … well, a message.”
“Oh?”
“It’s pretty cryptic.”
“What did she say?”
“She said: ‘Fredriksson is Poison Pen.’ ”
Erika sat for ten seconds in silence while thoughts rushed through her head. Impossible. Peter isn’t like that. Salander has to be wrong.
“Was that all?”
“That’s the whole message. Do you know what it’s about?”
“Yes.”
“Ricky, what are you and that girl up to? She rang you to tip me off about Teleborian, and—”
“Thanks, Micke. We’ll talk later.”
She turned off her mobile and looked at Linder with an expression of absolute astonishment.
“Tell me,” Linder said.
Linder was of two minds. Berger had been told that her assistant editor was the one sending the vicious emails. She talked non-stop. Then Linder had asked her how she knew Fredriksson was her stalker. Berger was silent. Linder noticed her eyes and saw that something had changed in her attitude. She was all of a sudden totally confused.
“I can’t tell you.”
“What do you mean you can’t tell me?”
“Susanne, I just know that Fredriksson is responsible. But I can’t t
ell you how I got that information. What can I do?”
“If I’m going to help you, you have to tell me.”
“I … I can’t. You don’t understand.”
Berger got up and stood at the kitchen window with her back to Linder. Finally she turned.
“I’m going to his house.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’re not going anywhere, least of all to the home of somebody who obviously hates you.”
Berger looked torn.
“Sit down. Tell me what happened. It was Blomkvist calling you, right?”
Berger nodded.
“I … today I asked a hacker to go through the home computers of the staff.”
“Aha. So you’ve probably by extension committed a serious computer crime. And you don’t want to tell me who your hacker is?”
“I promised I would never tell anyone. Other people are involved. Something that Mikael is working on.”
“Does Blomkvist know about the emails and the break-in here?”
“No; he was just passing on a message.”
Linder cocked her head to one side, and all of a sudden a chain of associations formed in her mind.
Erika Berger. Mikael Blomkvist. Millennium. Rogue policemen who broke in and bugged Blomkvist’s apartment. Linder watching the watchers. Blomkvist working like a madman on a story about Lisbeth Salander.
The fact that Salander was a wizard at computers was widely known at Milton Security. No-one knew how she had come by her skills, and Linder had never heard any rumours that Salander might be a hacker. But Armansky had once said something about Salander’s delivering quite incredible reports when she was doing personal investigations. A hacker . . .
But Salander is under guard on a ward in Göteborg.
It was absurd.
“Is it Salander we’re talking about?” Linder said.
Berger looked as though she had touched a live wire.
“I can’t discuss where the information came from. Not one word.”
Linder laughed aloud.
It was Salander. Berger’s confirmation of it could not have been clearer. She’s completely off balance.
Yet it’s impossible.
Under guard as she was, Salander nevertheless took on the job of finding out who Poison Pen was. Sheer madness.
Linder thought hard.