THE MILLENNIUM SERIES BY STIEG LARSSON
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl Who Played with Fire
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
THE MILLENNIUM SERIES BY DAVID LAGERCRANTZ
The Girl in the Spider’s Web
The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye
ALSO BY DAVID LAGERCRANTZ IN ENGLISH TRANSLATION
NON-FICTION
I am Zlatan Ibrahimović
FICTION
Fall of Man in Wilmslow
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by
MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK company
Hon som måste dö © David Lagercrantz & Moggliden AB,
first published by Norstedts, Sweden, in 2019
Published by agreement with Norstedts Agency
English translation copyright © 2019 by George Goulding
Map © Emily Faccini
The moral right of David Lagercrantz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
George Goulding asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of the work
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN (HB) 978 0 85705 636 8
ISBN (TPB) 978 0 85705 637 5
ISBN (E-BOOK) 978 0 85705 638 2
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental
CONTENTS
Also by David Lagercrantz
Title Page
Copyright
Map of Stockholm
Characters in the Millennium series
Prologue
Part I: The Unknown
Part II: The Mountain People
Part III: Serving Two Masters
Epilogue
Author’s Acknowledgements
Author and Translator Biographies
CHARACTERS AND ORGANISATIONS IN THE MILLENNIUM SERIES
LISBETH SALANDER an elusive, exceptionally talented hacker and mathematical genius, tattooed and with a troubled past, driven by a need for justice – and vengeance.
MIKAEL BLOMKVIST a leading investigative journalist at Millennium magazine. Salander helped him to research one of the biggest stories of his career, about the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. He later helped to clear her of murder and vindicate her in a legal battle over her right to determine her own affairs. Sometimes nicknamed “Kalle Blomkvist”, after a boy detective who appears in several novels by Astrid Lindgren.
ALEXANDER ZALACHENKO also known as Zala, or by his alias Karl Axel Bodin. A Russian spy who defected to Sweden and was protected for years by a special group within Säpo. He was the head of a criminal empire but also the father of Lisbeth Salander, who tried to kill him for the violent abuse of her mother. Ultimately he was finished off by Säpo.
RONALD NIEDERMANN Lisbeth Salander’s half-brother, a blond giant impervious to pain. Salander arranged his murder.
CAMILLA SALANDER Lisbeth’s troublesome twin sister, from whom she is estranged. Linked to criminal gangs and thought to live in Moscow. Known within her networks as Kira.
AGNETA SALANDER Lisbeth and Camilla’s mother, who died in a nursing home at the age of forty-three.
PETER TELEBORIAN Salander’s sadistic child psychiatrist. Chief prosecution witness in Salander’s incompetency trial.
HOLGER PALMGREN Salander’s former guardian, a lawyer. One of the few people who knows Salander well and whom she trusts. Recently murdered by associates of Peter Teleborian, for holding documents that shed light on Salander’s abuse as a child.
DRAGAN ARMANSKY Salander’s former employer, the head of Milton Security. Another of the few she trusts.
MIRIAM WU Salander’s friend and occasional lover, also known as “Mimmi”.
ERIKA BERGER editor-in-chief of Millennium magazine, a close friend and occasional lover of Blomkvist’s.
GREGER BECKMAN Erika Berger’s husband, an architect.
MALIN ERIKSSON managing editor of Millennium magazine.
ANNIKA GIANNINI Blomkvist’s sister, a defence lawyer who has represented Salander.
JURIJ BOGDANOV star hacker in Camilla Salander’s “Spider Society”, erstwhile drug addict and petty criminal.
“ED THE NED” Edwin Needham, a gifted and outspoken computer security technician at the N.S.A., America’s national security agency.
JAN BUBLANSKI chief inspector with the Stockholm police, headed the team investigating the Salander case. Known as “Officer Bubble”.
SONJA MODIG a police inspector who has for some years worked closely with Bublanski, along with CURT SVENSSON, AMANDA FLOD and JERKER HOLMBERG.
HANS FASTE a police officer who has clashed with colleagues in the past, and leaked information during an earlier investigation into Salander.
FARAH SHARIF professor of computer sciences, fiancée to Jan Bublanski.
SVAVELSJÖ M.C. a thuggish motorcycle gang closely associated with Niedermann and Zalachenko. Some of its criminal members have in the past been seriously injured by Salander.
HACKER REPUBLIC a coalition of hackers, among whom Salander, who goes by the handle “Wasp”, is the star. Includes Plague, Trinity and Bob the Dog.
SÄPO the Swedish security police, which harboured a secret faction, known as “the Section”. Dedicated to protecting Zalachenko.
MUST the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service.
M.S.B. the Swedish Civil Contingencies Agency.
PROLOGUE
A beggar nobody had seen before appeared in the neighbourhood that summer. No-one knew him by name, nor seemed to care much about him, but to a young couple who passed him every morning he was the “crazy dwarf”. He was in fact around one metre fifty tall, but he was certainly erratic, and he would occasionally spring up and grab people by the arm, babbling incoherently.
Most of the day he sat on a piece of cardboard right by the fountain and the statue of Thor in Mariatorget, and there he commanded a measure of respect. With his head held high and his back always straight he looked like a chieftain who had fallen on hard times. That was all the social capital he had left, and it was why some people still tossed him coins or banknotes, as though they could sense a lost greatness. And they were not mistaken. There had indeed been a time when people bowed before him. But all repute, all status, had long since been stripped from him. He was missing several fingers and the dark patches on his cheeks did not improve his appearance. They looked to be a shadow of death itself.
The only thing which stood out was his quilted down jacket, a blue Marmot parka which must have been expensive. It looked so out of place, not just because of all the dirt and stains on it, but also because it was much too wintry a garment to be worn at the height of summer in Stockholm. An oppressive heat lay over the city, and as the sweat trickled down the man’s cheeks, passers-by studied the jacket with a pained expression, as if the very sight of it made them feel uncomfortably hot themselves. But the beggar was never without it.
He looked lost to the world and seemed unlikely ever to be
a threat to anybody, but it was later said that at the beginning of August a more determined expression came over him. On the afternoon of the 11th he was seen painstakingly writing out a screed on lined A4 paper and, later that same evening, he stuck it up like a wall newspaper on the bus stop at Södra station.
It was a rambling account of a storm and referred by name to a member of the government. A young medical intern called Else Sandberg, who was waiting for the number 4 bus, managed to decipher parts of it and could not help being intrigued, professionally. Her best guess at a diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia.
But when the bus arrived ten minutes later, she forgot all about it, left only with a feeling of unease. It was like the curse of Cassandra: nobody was going to believe the man because the story he was telling was so wrapped up in madness. Yet somehow his message must have got through, because the very next morning a man in a white shirt got out of a blue Audi and tore the wall newspaper down, crumpling the shreds of it and taking them back to his car.
On the night of Friday, August 14, the beggar made his way over to Norra Bantorget to get hold of some moonshine. There he met another drunk, a former industrial worker named Heikki Järvinen, from Österbotten.
“Hey, brother. Are you desperate?” Järvinen said.
There was no answer, not at first. Then a stream of words came pouring out, which to Heikki sounded like a load of bragging, and he hissed “what total bullshit”, adding needlessly – he admitted as much himself – that the man looked like a “bloody Chinaman”.
“Me Khamba-chen … hate China!” the beggar yelled at him.
Then he punched Heikki with his damaged hand and, even though there was no skill or technique there, the blow carried an unexpected authority. Heikki was bleeding from the mouth and swearing profusely in Finnish as he staggered away, down into the Tunnelbana at Central Station.
The beggar was next seen back in his familiar neighbourhood, very drunk and clearly feeling ill. Saliva ran from his mouth and he was holding his throat and muttering:
“Very tired … Must find dharamsala, and Ihawa, very good Ihawa … Do you know?”
He never waited for an answer but crossed Ringvägen like a sleepwalker, and soon after that he threw an unlabelled bottle onto the ground and disappeared among the trees and bushes of Tantolunden. A light rain fell overnight and in the morning a north wind was blowing. By eight the wind had died down and the skies had cleared, and the man was seen on his knees, leaning up against a birch tree.
On the street, preparations were underway for the Midnattslopp race that coming night. The neighbourhood was in a festive mood.
The beggar was dead.
No-one cared or knew that this strange man had lived a life of unimaginable hardship and heroism, still less that he had only ever loved one woman, and that she too, in another time, had died in devastating solitude.
PART I
THE UNKNOWN
15. – 25.viii
Many dead never have a name and some not even a grave.
Others get one white cross among thousands of others, as in the military cemeteries in France.
Some few have a whole monument dedicated to them, like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris or in the Alexander Garden in Moscow.
CHAPTER 1
15.viii
The first person to pluck up the courage to cross the street and go up to the tree, only to discover that the man was dead, was the writer Ingela Dufva. It was half past eleven by then. The smell was terrible. Flies and mosquitoes were buzzing about, and Dufva was not being entirely truthful when she later said there was something deeply moving about the figure.
The man had vomited and suffered from diarrhoea. Instead of empathy, she felt anxiety and contemplated with dread the prospect of her own death. Even Sandra Lindevall and Samir Eman, the police officers who arrived at the scene fifteen minutes later, looked upon their assignment as some sort of punishment.
They photographed the man and examined the immediate surroundings, but their search did not extend to the slope below Zinkens Väg, where a half-bottle of alcohol lay with a thin layer of grit in the bottom. Even though neither of them thought the incident had crime “written all over it”, they examined his head and chest with care. They found no trace of violence, nor any other sign that pointed to the cause of death, apart from the thick drool which had trailed from his mouth. Having discussed the matter with their superiors, they decided not to cordon off the area.
While waiting for an ambulance to come and take the body away, they went through the pockets of the filthy, shapeless and quite unsuitable down jacket. They found many pieces of the translucent paper in which hot dogs are sold in the street, some coins, a twenty-kronor note and a receipt from an office supplies store on Hornsgatan, but no I.D. card or other papers that might have allowed them to identify the dead man.
They supposed it would not be difficult to find out who he was. There was no shortage of distinctive features. But like so much else, this proved to be a mistaken assumption. When the autopsy was carried out at the forensic medicine unit in Solna, X-rays were taken of the man’s teeth. No match was found for them in any database, nor for the prints from his remaining fingers. Having sent off some samples to the National Forensics Laboratory, Medical Examiner Dr Fredrika Nyman checked some telephone numbers handwritten on a piece of paper found in one of the man’s trouser pockets, though it did not in any way fall within her responsibilities to do so.
One number was that of Mikael Blomkvist at Millennium magazine. For a few hours she thought no more about it. But later in the evening, after a particularly upsetting row with one of her teenage daughters, she reminded herself that in the past year alone she had performed autopsies on three bodies which were then buried without being identified, and she swore at that, and at life in general.
She was forty-nine, a single mother of two, and she suffered from back pain and insomnia and the sense that life was meaningless. Without thinking it through she rang Mikael Blomkvist.
The telephone buzzed. It was an unknown number and Blomkvist ignored it. He had just left his apartment and was on his way down Hornsgatan towards Slussen and Gamla Stan with no clue where he was heading. He wandered aimlessly through the lanes until at last he sat down at an open-air café and ordered a Guinness.
It was seven in the evening, but still warm. Laughter and applause could be heard coming from Skeppsholmen and he looked up at the blue sky and felt a mild, pleasant breeze coming off the water. He tried to persuade himself that life was not, after all, so bad. But even after a beer and then a second he wasn’t convinced, so he paid and decided to head home to do some work. Or perhaps he would immerse himself in a T.V. series or a thriller.
Then almost immediately he changed his mind and set off towards Mosebacke and Fiskargatan. Lisbeth Salander lived at Fiskargatan 9. He was not at all confident she would be at home – after the funeral of Holger Palmgren, her former guardian, she had travelled around Europe and only sporadically answered Blomkvist’s e-mails and texts – but he would try his luck. He took the steps up from the square and turned to face the building opposite the apartment block. He was amazed. Since he had last been there the entire blank wall had been covered by an enormous work of street art. But he spent no time studying it, even though it was a painting to lose oneself in, full of surreal detail, like a funny little man in tartan trousers standing barefoot on a green Tunnelbana carriage.
He keyed in the front-door code, got into the lift and glared at the mirror inside. You would hardly know that the summer had been hot and sunny. He saw himself pale and hollow-eyed and he was weighed down still by the stock market crash which he had been wrestling with all through July. It was an important story, no question. It had been a rout, caused not just by high valuations and over-inflated expectations but also by hacker attacks and disinformation campaigns. By now every investigative journalist worth his salt was digging into it, and even though he had uncovered a g
reat deal – among other things he had discovered which troll factory in Russia had chiefly been spreading the lies – it felt as if the world was managing just fine without his efforts. He should probably take some time off, get some much-needed exercise, and maybe take better care of his colleague Erika, who was in the throes of getting a divorce from Greger.
The lift came to a halt and he pushed open the wrought-iron gate and got out, already convinced that his visit would be a waste of time. Salander was almost certainly away, and was definitely ignoring him. But then he saw that the door to her apartment was wide open, and remembered how frightened he had been all summer that her enemies would go after her. He rushed in over the threshold. “Hello … hello!” he shouted, and was met by the smell of fresh paint and cleaning products.
He heard footsteps behind him. Someone was snorting like a bull on the stairs and he spun around and found himself confronting two stocky men in blue overalls. They were carrying something large, and he was so agitated that he was unable to grasp this perfectly normal scene.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“What does it look like?”
It looked like two removal men lugging a blue sofa, a stylish new piece of designer furniture, and Lisbeth – he of all people knew – was not one for stylish interiors. He was about to say something when he heard a voice from inside the apartment. For an instant he thought it was Lisbeth’s and he brightened. But this was only wishful thinking. It didn’t sound remotely like her.
“A distinguished visitor. To what do I owe this honour?”
He turned and saw a tall black woman standing on the threshold, contemplating him with a mocking look. She was wearing jeans and an elegant grey blouse. Her hair was in braids and her almond eyes sparkled, and he became even more confused. Did he know her?
“No, no,” he managed. “I just …”
“You just …”
“Got the wrong floor.”
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 1