It was as if the earth had swallowed her and Camilla looked about the pandemonium in desperation, at the guests screaming in confusion, and only just had time to let out a roar of frustration when a savage blow to the shoulder knocked her down. She banged an elbow and her head on the pavement. As her forehead throbbed with pain and her lip bled, and as feet were stamping all around her, she heard an icily familiar voice directly above her – “Just wait, sister, I will have my revenge” – and she was much too dazed to react.
By the time she raised her head and could see properly, there was no sign of Lisbeth, only a stream of people stampeding out of the restaurant. Again she shouted: “Kill her,” but even she no longer believed it.
Vladimir Kuznetsov did not notice Kira falling to the ground. He was all but oblivious to the madness around him. In the midst of all the racket he had picked up something which terrified him more than everything else, a sequence of words bawled out with a pulsating, staccato rhythm, and at first he refused to believe his ears.
He shook his head and muttered “No, no”, trying to dismiss it as a horrible figment of his imagination, a trick played by his fevered fantasy. But it really was that tune – that nightmare tune – and he wanted only to sink into the ground and die.
“It can’t be true, it can’t be true,” he groaned as the chorus blared at him, like the pressure wave from a grenade:
Killing the world with lies.
Giving the leaders
The power to paralyse
Feeding the murderers with hate,
Amputate, devastate, congratulate.
But never, never
Apologise.
No song on earth had petrified him like this one, and compared to that it did not matter that the party he had so been looking forward to had been sabotaged, or that he was likely to be sued by livid oligarchs for bursting their eardrums. All he could think of was the music. That it was being played here, right now, told him that someone had penetrated his darkest secret. He was in danger of being disgraced before the whole world. His chest seized up in panic and he could hardly breathe, but he made every effort to look as if nothing were untoward. When his men finally managed to turn off the racket, he even pretended to breathe a sigh of relief.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I do beg your pardon,” he announced above the hubbub. “This just goes to show you should never rely on technology. I apologise profusely. But let’s get on with the party. There’ll be no shortage of drinks, or other treats for that matter …”
He looked around for some lightly clad girls, as if an interlude of feminine beauty might rescue the situation. But the only young girls he saw were backed against the walls, scared to death, and he never finished his sentence. His guests could tell that he was falling apart, and since the musicians had now filed past him and out onto the street, most of them seemed anxious only to hurry home. In fact Kuznetsov was quite thankful for that. He wanted to be left alone with his thoughts and his fear.
Now would be the time to ring his lawyers and his contacts in the Kremlin, in the hope of getting a little comfort. He wanted to be told for certain that he would not be named as a pariah and war criminal in the western press. Kuznetsov had powerful protectors; he was a big shot who had committed appalling crimes without it troubling his conscience. But he was not a strong person for all that, not when “Killing the World with Lies” was being played at his own ostentatious private party.
When things like that happened, he was back to being a cheap nothing, a second-rate criminal who had, thanks to an amazing stroke of good fortune, ended up in the same Turkish bath as two members of the Duma one afternoon, and told them a few tall stories. Kuznetsov had no other talents – no education and no special skills – but he could spin incredible yarns, and that, it seemed, was all it took. Since then he had worked hard to build up a circle of influential friends and these days he had hundreds of employees, most of them significantly more intelligent than he was himself: mathematicians, strategists, psychologists, consultants from the F.S.B. and the G.R.U., hackers, computer scientists, engineers, A.I. and robotics experts. He was rich and powerful and, most important of all, nobody on the outside connected him with the information agencies and the lies.
He had skilfully concealed his responsibility and ownership, and lately he had been thanking his lucky stars for that. Not because of his involvement in the stock market crash, quite the opposite (in fact he considered that a feather in his cap), but rather because of the assignments in Chechnya which had exploded in the media, and led to protests and uproar at the United Nations. Worst of all, they had prompted a hard rock protest song which became a worldwide hit.
The track had been played at every bloody demonstration against the murders, and each time he had been terrified that his own name would be associated with them. Only during these last few weeks, while he had been planning his party, had life returned to normal. He could laugh and joke again, and tell his tall stories, and one important guest after the other had shown up tonight. He had squared his shoulders and had been enjoying the experience, when suddenly that song had started to blare out – and so loudly that his head almost burst.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
“I beg your pardon?”
A distinguished older gentleman with a hat and cane – in his confusion he could not place him – looked at him disapprovingly. Even though he would have liked to tell the ancient to take a running jump, he was afraid that he might be more powerful than he was himself. So he answered as politely as he could.
“Apologies for my language, I’m just angry.”
“You should check your I.T. security.”
As if I’ve been doing anything else, he thought. “It’s got nothing to do with that,” he replied.
“So, what is it then?”
“It was something … electrical,” he said.
Electrical. Was he totally stupid? Had the wiring simply short-circuited and played “Killing the World with Lies” all by itself? He was embarrassed and looked away, waving pathetically to some of the last guests who were slipping off in taxis. The restaurant was emptying of people and he looked around for Felix, his young chief technician. Where the hell was that useless cretin?
Eventually he found him by the stage, talking into his telephone with his ridiculous goatee and the absurd dinner jacket which hung on him like a sack. He seemed agitated, and so he should be. That moron had promised that nothing could possibly go wrong, and now the sky had fallen on their heads. Kuznetsov gestured at him angrily.
Felix responded with a dismissive wave, which made Kuznetsov want to punch him or bang his head against the wall. Yet when Felix finally ambled over, Kuznetsov reacted quite differently. He sounded helpless.
“Did you hear what song that was?”
“I heard,” Felix said.
“So someone on the outside knows.”
“I guess so.”
“What do you think’ll happen?”
“No idea.”
“Does it mean we can expect to be blackmailed now?”
Felix did not reply and bit his lip, and Kuznetsov stared blankly out at the street.
“I think we can expect something much worse than that,” Felix said.
Don’t say that, Kuznetsov thought. Don’t say that.
“Why?”
His voice cracked.
“Because Bogdanov just called—”
“Bogdanov?”
“Kira’s guy.”
Kira, he thought, gorgeous, odious Kira, and then he remembered: that was how it had all started, with her beautiful face twisted into a dreadful grimace, and her mouth screaming “Shoot! Kill!”, and her eyes fixed on that dark figure further along the wall. Thinking back, all this seemed to be linked to the ensuing cacophony.
“What did Bogdanov say?” he said.
“That he knows who hacked us.”
Electrical, he thought. How the hell could I have said “electrical”?
“So we�
��ve been hacked?”
“That’s what it looks like.”
“But that was supposed to be impossible. Impossible, you fucking idiot.”
“No, but this person—”
“What about this bloody person?”
“She’s highly skilled.”
“So it’s a she?”
“And she doesn’t seem to be after any money.”
“What is she after, then?”
“Revenge,” Felix said. Kuznetsov’s whole body shook and he punched Felix on the chin.
Then he walked away and drank himself into a stupor on champagne and vodka.
Salander was calm as she let herself into her hotel room. She poured herself a glass of whisky and drained it in one, and took some nuts from a bowl on the coffee table. Then she took her time to pack, and there was nothing rushed or nervous about her movements.
Only once she had zipped up her bag, ready to go, did she notice that her body was unnaturally tense. Her eyes were casting around for something to smash to pieces – a vase, a painting, the crystal chandelier in the ceiling – but in the end she just went into the bathroom and stared into the mirror, studying every feature in her face. She saw nothing.
In her mind she was back on Tverskoy Boulevard, her hand reaching for her weapon, and the same hand then being withdrawn. She remembered what made it feel easy, and what made it so difficult, and realised that, for the first time all summer, she had no idea what to do. She was … well, what was she …? Lost, most likely, and she didn’t even get a boost from picking up her mobile and finding out where Camilla lived.
From a Google satellite map she could see a large stone house surrounded by terraces, gardens, pools and statues. She tried to imagine it all burning, just like her father in his Mercedes on Lundagatan, but it made her feel no better. What had seemed like a perfect plan was one big mess, and she realised that her hesitation, both now and all those years ago, was deadly dangerous and a handicap to her. She reached for more whisky.
When she had paid her hotel bill online, she picked up her bag and left, and only once she was several blocks away did she take the pistol, wipe it clean, and throw it into a drain. She took a taxi, booked a flight to Copenhagen for early the following morning using one of her fake passports, and checked in to the Sheraton next to Sheremetyevo airport.
In the early hours of the morning she saw that Blomkvist had sent her a text. He was worried, he told her, and that reminded her of the film sequence from Fiskargatan. She decided to sneak into his computer via her usual back door. She couldn’t have said why. Maybe she just needed to turn her thoughts to something other than the images that kept repeating in her mind, and she sat down at the desk.
After a while she found some encrypted documents, and assumed they must be important to him. Yet it seemed as though he wanted her to be able to read them. In the files he had created for her, he had left clues and leads which only she could understand, and having skipped around on his server for half an hour or so, she immersed herself in a long article he’d written about the stock market crash and troll factories. He had managed to unearth a fair amount, but not as much she had, and after ploughing twice through the article she added something towards the end and inserted a link to various documents and e-mails. By this time she was so tired that she failed to notice she had misspelled Kuznetsov’s name, and had also failed to stick to Blomkvist’s usual writing style. But she made sure to log out and lay back on the bed without taking off either her suit or her shoes.
When she fell asleep, she dreamed that her father was standing in a sea of fire, telling her that she had become weak and would not stand a chance against Camilla.
CHAPTER 5
16.viii
Blomkvist woke at six on Sunday morning. It must be the heat, he thought. The air was close, as before a storm, and his sheets and pillows were soaked with sweat. His head was pounding and briefly he wondered if he was falling sick, until the events of the evening before came back to him. He remembered sitting up late and having a few drinks, and he cursed as the morning light now seeped under the curtains. Pulling the covers over his head, he tried to go back to sleep.
But then he made the mistake of checking his mobile to see if Salander had answered his text message. Of course she had not. He began to brood over her again, which was no way to relax, and in the end he sat up in bed.
There was a jumble of books on the bedside table which he had started but never finished, and for a while he contemplated staying in bed and reading, or perhaps working on his article. Instead he went into the kitchen and made himself a cappuccino, then fetched the morning papers and buried himself in the news. Half an hour later he had answered a number of e-mails and had pottered around in his apartment, tidying a little as he went.
At half past nine he got a text message from Sofie Melker, his young colleague who had just moved into the neighbourhood with her husband and two sons. Sofie wanted to discuss an idea for a story, and he didn’t feel like it at all. But he was fond of Sofie so he suggested meeting at Kaffebar on St Paulsgatan in half an hour. He got a thumbs up in reply. He did not like emojis; language seemed to him perfectly adequate. But he did not want to seem old-fashioned and decided to send some cheerful little image in response.
With his clumsy fingers he sent a red heart instead of a smiley. That could perhaps be misconstrued. But what the hell … there had been inflation there too, he thought. These days an emoji heart didn’t mean anything, did it? He went to shower and shave, and put on jeans and a summer shirt.
There was a clear blue sky and brilliant sunshine, and he took the stone steps down to Hornsgatan, swung out into Mariatorget and looked around. He was surprised to see so few signs of the previous evening’s festivities. Not even a cigarette butt on the gravel paths. The rubbish bins had been emptied and over to the left, outside the Rival Hotel, a young girl in an orange vest was picking litter off the grass with some elongated tongs. He passed her and then the statue in the middle of the square.
It was a statue he walked past more often than any other in town. Yet he could not have said what it represented, as with so many things in front of our noses. If anyone had asked him, he would probably have guessed at St George and the Dragon. But it was Thor slaying the sea serpent Jörmungandr. During all these years he had never even read the inscription, and this time too he looked past the statue at a young father pushing his son on a swing in the playground, and at the benches and the grass on which people were sitting with their faces turned to the sun. It looked like any Sunday morning. And yet he sensed that there was something missing. It must be his memory playing tricks, he thought, and he had already set off again, turning into St Paulsgatan, when it dawned on him.
What was missing was a figure he had not seen for a while now, but who used to sit on a piece of cardboard by the statue, motionless, like a meditating monk. A man with some fingers no more than stumps, with a weather-beaten, ancient face and a bulky, blue down jacket. For a while he had been a part of the scenery of Blomkvist’s daily life, although, as so often when his work was intense, only by way of a backdrop.
He had been too wrapped up in himself to really see. But the poor devil had been sitting there all the time, something that he was not even conscious of, and only now that he was gone was he more visible, oddly. Now Blomkvist had no difficulty in conjuring up a number of details about him: the dark patches on his cheeks, the cracked lips and a dignity about his demeanour, in contrast to the suffering that was manifest in his body. And even when the medical examiner had been asking him about the man who had died, he had not made the connection.
How could he have so completely blocked him out? Somehow, he knew the answer.
In the past, a presence like his in the street would have been painfully obvious. But nowadays you could hardly walk more than fifty metres without someone trying to touch you for a few kronor. There were women and men begging everywhere on pavements, outside shops, at recycling centres and on the step
s leading down into the Tunnelbana. A whole new broken Stockholm had emerged, and in no time at all everyone had got used to it. That was the sad truth.
The number of beggars had grown at around the same time that Stockholmers had stopped carrying cash, and just like everybody else he had learned to look away. Often he did not even feel guilty, and he was overcome by melancholy, not necessarily because of the man or even the plight of beggars in general; it was perhaps rather the transience of time, and how life changes and we barely notice it.
A lorry was parked outside Kaffebar, in such a tight spot that he wondered how it would ever be able to get out. As usual he knew far too many people in the café. He was in no mood for chatting, so he gave them only the most perfunctory of greetings before ordering a double espresso and a chanterelle toast, and he sat down at a window table facing St Paulsgatan and let his thoughts carry him away. A moment later he felt a hand on his back. It was Sofie, who smiled at him cautiously. She ordered tea with milk and a bottle of Perrier, and then held out her mobile with the red heart.
“Flirting? Or just staff motivation?”
“Clumsy fingers,” he said.
“Wrong answer.”
“In that case, good H.R. instructions from Erika.”
“Still wrong, but better.”
“How’s the family?” he said.
“The mother thinks that the summer holidays have been way too long. You have to keep those kids entertained the whole time, the little hooligans.”
“How long have you been living here now?”
“Almost five months, and you?”
“Oh, a hundred years.”
She laughed.
“I sort of mean it,” he said. “When you’ve lived here as long as I have, you end up not seeing anything anymore. You walk around in a kind of daze.”
“You do?”
“I do, at least. But when you’re new to the area your eyes are probably wide open.”
“Maybe.”
“Do you remember a beggar sitting in a big quilted jacket in Mariatorget? He had dark patches on his face and was missing most of the fingers on one hand.”
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 4