She gave a sad smile.
“Oh yes, very well.”
“Why do you put it like that?”
“Because he wasn’t easy to forget.”
“Well, I forgot him.”
Sofie looked at him in surprise.
“How do you mean?”
“I must have seen him at least ten times, yet I never really registered it. Only now that he’s dead does he seem alive to me.”
“He’s dead?”
“The medical examiner called me yesterday.”
“Why you, of all people?”
“Because my mobile number was in the man’s pocket and she was probably hoping I could help identify him.”
“But you couldn’t?”
“Not at all.”
“He probably thought he had some story for you.”
“Presumably.”
Sofie finished her tea and they sat quietly for a little while.
“He accosted Catrin Lindås a week ago,” she said eventually.
“He did?”
“He went berserk when he caught sight of her. I saw it from some way off, on Swedenborgsgatan.”
“What did he want from her?”
“He’d probably seen her on T.V.”
Catrin Lindås did appear on television every now and then. She was a leader writer and columnist, a conservative who often took part in debates about law and order, or on school discipline and teaching standards. She was good-looking in an elegant sort of way. She wore beautifully tailored suits and silk pussy-bow blouses, and never had a hair out of place. Blomkvist thought of her as serious and unimaginative. She had been critical of him in Svenska Dagbladet.
“What happened?”
“He grabbed hold of her arm and was shouting.”
“Shouting what?”
“I’ve no idea. But he was waving some sort of stick. It left Catrin in a complete state. I tried to calm her down and helped her remove a grubby mark on her jacket.”
“Oh dear, that must have been awful for her.”
He had not meant to sound sarcastic, but Sofie was onto him in an instant.
“You’ve never liked her, have you?”
“Nothing much wrong with her, I guess,” he said defensively. “She’s just a bit too right-wing and proper for me, that’s all.”
“Little Miss Perfect, right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, but you meant it. Do you have any idea how much shit she gets online? She’s seen as some sort of upper-class bitch who’s been to boarding school at Lundsberg and looks down her nose at ordinary people. But have you any idea what she’s been through?”
“No, Sofie, I don’t.”
He could not understand why she had suddenly got so angry.
“In that case I’ll tell you. She grew up in miserable circumstances, in a cracked-out hippy commune in Göteborg. Her parents were doing L.S.D. and heroin, and home was a total mess, with people sitting around stoned out of their minds. Her suits and her tidiness have been her way of surviving. She’s a fighter. A rebel, in a way.”
“Interesting,” he said.
“Exactly so, and I know you think she’s a reactionary, but she does an enormous amount of good in her fight against the new age and spiritual crap she grew up with. She’s a lot more interesting than people realise.”
“Are you friends?”
“We are.”
“Thanks, Sofie. In that case I’ll try to see her in a different light in future.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said, laughing apologetically, but the way she mumbled made it clear that this mattered to her.
Then she asked him how he was getting on with his story. He told her that he wasn’t exactly progressing in leaps and bounds. He said that the Russian lead had dried up.
“But you’ve got good sources, haven’t you?”
“What my sources don’t know, I don’t know either.”
“Maybe you should head off to St Petersburg, find out more about that troll factory. What was its name again?”
“New Agency House?”
“Wasn’t it some sort of hub?”
“That looks like a dead end too.”
“Am I listening to an unusually pessimistic Blomkvist?”
He could hear it too, but he had no wish to go to St Petersburg. The place was already teeming with journalists, and no-one had been able to find out who was behind the factory, or to what extent the intelligence services and the government were involved. He was fed up with it. He was tired of the news in general, tired of all the depressing political developments around the world. He ordered another espresso and asked Sofie about her idea for an article.
She wanted to write about the anti-Semitism in the disinformation campaign. This was nothing new because the trolls had been unable to resist suggesting that the whole stock market crash was a Jewish conspiracy. It was the same ugly rubbish which had been churned out for centuries, written about and analysed countless times before, but Sofie had a more specific angle. She wanted to portray how this had affected people in their everyday lives – schoolchildren, teachers, intellectuals – ordinary individuals who had hitherto given hardly a thought to the fact that they were Jewish. “Great, go for it,” Blomkvist said. He asked her a few questions and made one or two suggestions, and spoke generally about hate in the community among the populists and extremists. He told her about all the idiots who had left bile on his voicemail. After a while he became fed up with listening to himself and gave Sofie a hug. He apologised – without really knowing why – and said goodbye, and then went home and changed to go for a run.
CHAPTER 6
16.viii
Kira was in bed in the large house in Rublyovka to the west of Moscow when she received the message that her chief hacker, Jurij Bogdanov, wanted to talk to her. He would have to wait, she replied. For good measure she threw a hairbrush at her housekeeper Katya, and pulled the duvet over her head. It had been a night from hell. The memory of the commotion at the restaurant, her sister’s determined stride and silhouette, would not leave her, and she kept touching her shoulder, still aching from the impact of her fall to the pavement: it was not the pain so much as a presence which she simply could not shake off.
Why could it not end? She had worked so hard and achieved so much. But the past kept coming back, again and again, and each time it seemed in a new guise. There had been nothing good about her childhood, yet there had been parts which in her way she had loved. Now even those were being torn from her, one by one.
As a child, Camilla had longed to get out and away, far from Lundagatan, and away from life with her sister and mother, leaving behind the poverty and vulnerability. From an early age she knew that she deserved better. She had a distant memory of being in the Ljusgården atrium at the N.K. department store. A woman wearing a fur coat and patterned trousers was laughing, and she was so incredibly beautiful that she seemed to belong to another world entirely. Camilla moved closer until she was standing right by her legs, and then an equally elegant friend arrived and kissed the woman on both cheeks.
“My goodness, is that your daughter?” she said.
The first woman turned and looked down, seeing Camilla for the first time. “I wish it were,” she answered in English with a smile.
Camilla did not understand, but she could tell that it was meant to be flattering. As she walked away she heard the woman continue in Swedish: “Such a pretty girl. Shame that her mother doesn’t dress her better,” and those words left a gash in her. She stared at Agneta – even then she called her mother Agneta – who was looking at the Christmas window display with Lisbeth, and she saw the yawning gulf. These two women were radiant, as if life was laid out for their enjoyment alone, whereas Agneta was stooped and pale, dressed in worn and ugly clothes. A searing sense of injustice flared within her. I’ve ended up in the wrong place, she thought.
There were many such moments in her childhood, times when she felt both elated and
damned: elated because people would call her as pretty as a little princess, damned because she was part of a family which lived on the margins, in the shadows.
It was true that she began to steal things to be able to buy clothes and hair slides. It wasn’t much, not at all, coins mostly, then a few notes, an old brooch of her grandmother’s, the Russian vase on the bookshelf. But it was also true that she was accused of much more than that, and it became clear to her that Agneta and Lisbeth were ganging up against her. She often felt like a stranger in her own home, a changeling who was being kept under supervision, and matters did not improve when Zala came to visit and threw her aside like a mongrel.
At times like those she was the loneliest person in the world. She would dream of running away and finding someone else to look after her, someone who was more deserving of her. But slowly light began to seep in, a false sheen perhaps. But it was all there was. It started with her noticing small things – a golden wristwatch, wads of money in trouser pockets, a commanding tone over the telephone – tiny indications that there was more to Zala than his violence. Gradually she began to see the self-confidence, the authority, the urbane and forceful nature – the power that he radiated.
Above all it was the way that he began to look at her. He would take his time to look her up and down, and sometimes he would smile and there was no way she could resist that. Usually he never smiled, which made this so powerful, as if a searchlight had been turned on her, and at some point she stopped dreading his visits and even began to fantasise that it was he who would take her away from there to a richer, more beautiful place.
One evening, when she was eleven or twelve years old and Agneta and Lisbeth were out, her father was in the kitchen, drinking vodka. She joined him there and he stroked her hair and offered her a drink which he had mixed with juice. “A screwdriver,” he said, and he told her how he had grown up in a children’s home in Sverdlovsk in the Urals, where he had been beaten every day, but that he had fought his way to power and wealth, to having friends all over the world. It sounded like something out of a fairy tale, and he put his finger to his lips and whispered that it was a secret. She shivered, and it was then that she plucked up the courage to tell him how mean Agneta and Lisbeth were to her.
“They’re jealous. Everybody envies people like you and me,” he said, and he promised that he would see to it that they were nicer to her. After that life at home changed.
With Zala’s visits, the big wide world was also there, and she loved him not only because he was her saviour. It was also that nothing could ruffle him. Not the serious men in grey coats who sometimes visited them, nor even the policemen with broad shoulders who knocked on the door one morning. But she could.
She could get him to be gentle and considerate, and for a long time she did not realise the price she was paying, still less that she was fooling herself. She saw it simply as the best time of her life. At last someone was paying attention to her, and she was happy. Her father was visiting more and more often, and furtively giving her presents and money.
But at the very moment when something new, something great seemed about to be hers, Lisbeth took it all away, and since then she had loathed her sister with a vengeance, with a hatred that had become her most enduring and defining characteristic. Now she wanted to destroy Lisbeth, and she was not about to waver just because her sister happened to be one step ahead.
After the night’s rain, the sun was beating down beyond the curtains. She heard the sound of lawnmowers and distant voices, and she closed her eyes and thought about the footsteps in the night, approaching their room on Lundagatan. Then she clenched her right fist, kicked off her duvet and got up.
She was going to retake the initiative.
Jurij Bogdanov had been waiting for an hour. But he had not been idle. He had been hard at work with his laptop on his knees, and only now did he cast a worried look onto the terrace and the large garden outside. He had no good news to share, and he expected only abuse and more hard work, but still, he felt strong and motivated, and he had mobilised his entire network. His mobile rang. Kuznetsov again. Stupid, hysterical, bloody Kuznetsov. He declined the call.
It was 11.10 and the gardeners were having an early lunch outside. Time was racing on and he looked down at his shoes. These days Bogdanov was rich and wore made-to-measure suits and expensive watches. But the gutter never altogether left him. He was an old junkie who had grown up on the streets, and that life had left traces in his demeanour and his movements that would never go away.
He had an angular, pockmarked face, and was tall and lean with narrow lips and amateur tattoos on his arms. But even though Kira would not want to show him off in smart society, he continued to be invaluable to her, and that gave him strength now as he heard her heels echoing along the marble floor. Here she came, as ethereally lovely as ever, wearing a light-blue suit and a red blouse buttoned all the way up, and she sat down in the armchair next to him.
“So, what have you got?” she said.
“Problems.”
“Let’s hear them.”
“That woman—”
“Lisbeth Salander.”
“We don’t have confirmation of that yet, but yes, it has to be her, mainly because of the sophistication of the attack. Kuznetsov is so paranoid about his I.T. systems that he has them checked by experts from every possible angle. He’d been given assurances that they were impossible to penetrate.”
“That was clearly wrong.”
“It was, and we still don’t know how she went about it, but the operation itself – once she was inside – was relatively straightforward. She connected to Spotify, and to the speakers which had been set up for the evening, and put on that rock song.”
“But people were driven nearly crazy by it.”
“There was an equaliser there too, which unfortunately was both digital and parametric, and connected to the WiFi.”
“Use words that I can understand.”
“The equaliser adjusts the volume, gets the base and treble just right, and Lisbeth – let’s just say it was her – connected her mobile up to that and created the worst kind of sound shock. Horrific, in fact, to the point where it could be felt in the heart. Apparently that’s why so many people were clutching their chests. They had no idea it was sound that was doing the damage.”
“So her objective was to create chaos.”
“Above all she wanted to send a message. The song’s called ‘Killing the World with Lies’, by the Crazy Sisters. You know, that hard rock protest band.”
“Those red-haired whores?”
“The very ones,” Bogdanov said, without admitting that he thought the band were pretty cool. “The song was written about the killings of gays in Chechnya, but in fact it’s not about the murderers themselves, or even the machinery of state, but about the person who orchestrated the hate campaign on social media which led to the violence.”
“Kuznetsov himself, in other words?”
“Exactly, but the thing is—”
“—that nobody on the outside is supposed to know about it.”
“No-one’s even meant to know that he’s behind the information agencies.”
“So how did Lisbeth find out?”
“We’re looking into that, and trying to reassure all those involved. Kuznetsov is wild. He’s wasted and scared witless.”
“How come? It’s not as if it’s the first time he’s pitted people against each other.”
“No indeed, but it all got out of hand in Chechnya. People were buried alive,” he said.
“That’s Kuznetsov’s own fucking problem.”
“It is. But what worries me …”
“Well, what?”
“Salander’s main target probably isn’t Kuznetsov at all. We can’t rule out that she knows about our own involvement in the information agencies. Don’t you think her vengeance might be directed at you, not him?”
“We should have killed her a long time ago.”
&n
bsp; “There’s one more thing I haven’t mentioned.”
“What?”
Bogdanov knew that there was no point in putting it off any longer.
“After barging into you last night, she stumbled,” he said. “The impact made her lose her balance and she tumbled forward – that’s what it looked like anyway. She had to catch herself with her hand against your limousine, just above the rear wheel. At first I thought it looked pretty natural. But then I ran the surveillance footage over and over, and came to the conclusion that it might not have been a fall after all. Rather than steadying herself, she was in fact pressing something against the bodywork. Here it is.”
He held up a small rectangular box.
“What is it?”
“A G.P.S. transmitter that followed you all the way here.”
“So now she knows where I live?”
Camilla forced out the words through clenched teeth and tasted blood in her mouth.
“I’m afraid so,” Bogdanov said.
“Idiots,” she spat.
“We’ve taken all precautions,” Bogdanov went on, increasingly nervous. “We’ve stepped up protection, especially of the I.T. system, obviously.”
“So we’re on the defensive now, is that what you’re saying?”
“No, no, not at all. I’m just telling you.”
“Just make sure you find her, then.”
“That’s not so easy, unfortunately. We’ve checked all the surveillance cameras in the area. We don’t see her anywhere, and we’ve not been able to trace her via any mobiles or computers.”
“Search the hotels then. Report her as missing. Turn everything upside down and inside out, everything you see and hear.”
“We’re working on it, I’m convinced we’ll crush her.”
“Just don’t underestimate that witch.”
“I don’t underestimate her for one second. But I think she’s missed her chance – the advantage has shifted to us.”
“How the hell can you say that when she knows where I live?”
Bogdanov hesitated, fumbling for words.
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 5