With every step she took she told herself: once I have come out of this alive, I will be able to cope with anything, and then, further down the mountain, she made out two other figures, and that gave her more hope.
Now I am safe.
Now, at last, I must be safe.
CHAPTER 29
28.viii
Catrin Lindås woke at 8.30 in the double bed at Hotel Lydmar and reached over to pull Mikael closer to her. But he was not there, so she called out:
“Bloombells?”
It was a silly nickname she had given him the night before, when he had not listened to a word she was saying – “You’ve got nothing but bluebells in your head, Bloombells” – and at least it had made him smile. Otherwise she found him impenetrable. Which was, after all, understandable. He was going to do an exclusive interview with the Minister of Defence, and it was all very hush-hush with encrypted instructions being sent to her mobile. The only way to get anything out of the man was to discuss his interview, and then he was not quite so remote. And at one point he tried to recruit her to Millennium. Straight after that she managed to undo his shirt buttons, then all the other ones as well, and they made love. Then she must have fallen asleep.
“Bloombells?” she called again. “Mikael?”
She looked at her watch. It was later than she thought. He must have left a long time ago, was probably doing the interview by now. She did wonder why she had not woken up. But sometimes her sleep was strangely deep, and it was quiet outside, you could hardly hear the traffic. She lay there until her mobile rang.
“Catrin Lindås,” she said.
“My name is Rebecka Forsell,” a voice said. “We’re beginning to get a little worried.”
“Isn’t Mikael with you?”
“He’s half an hour late and his mobile is switched off.”
“That’s odd,” she said.
It was very odd. She didn’t know Blomkvist that well, but surely he wouldn’t turn up half an hour late for such a crucial meeting.
“You don’t know where he could be?” Rebecka Forsell said.
“He’d already left by the time I woke up.”
“Had he now?”
Lindås detected a note of fear in the woman’s voice.
“I’m beginning to get worried,” Catrin said.
Or “cold” is that what she should have said? Stone cold.
“Do you have any particular reason to worry? Apart from the fact that he’s late?” Rebecka Forsell said.
“Well …” Her thoughts were racing. “For the past few days he’s not wanted to stay in his own home. He thought he was being watched,” she said.
“Is it because of this business with Johannes?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Lindås was not sure how much she should say, but then decided to be completely open.
“It’s to do with his friend, Lisbeth Salander. That’s all I know.”
“Oh, my God.”
“Why do you say that?”
“It’s a long story. But you know …” She sounded emotional. “I liked what you wrote about Johannes.”
“Thank you.”
“And I can see why Mikael trusts you.”
Lindås did not mention how many times that night she had sworn by all she held dear that she would not breathe a word about the story to anyone, and every time it had seemed that he did not believe her.
“Could you hang on a moment?”
Lindås waited, but regretted it at once. She couldn’t just sit around, she had to call the police and maybe also Erika Berger. By the time Rebecka Forsell was back on the line, she was about to hang up.
“We’re wondering if you couldn’t come over here yourself,” Rebecka said.
“I’m thinking I ought to call the police.”
“You probably should. But we … that is, our host here … we also have people who can investigate this matter.”
“I don’t know …” she said.
“In fact we think it would be safest if you came over here now. We’ll send a car, if you give us the address.”
Lindås bit her lip and remembered the man she had seen down in reception. She recalled the sensation of being followed on the way to the hotel.
“O.K.,” she said, and gave the address.
Moments later there was a knock at the door of her hotel room.
Bublanski had just called the T.T. news bureau, hoping that a bulletin would bring in some leads from the public. Although they had been hard at work since early that morning, they still had no idea where Blomkvist was. They knew he had spent the latter part of the evening at the Lydmar without anybody, including the receptionists, having seen him.
He had left the hotel just after 2.00 a.m. There was a short C.C.T.V. sequence which was anything but clear, but it did, beyond doubt, show Blomkvist in good shape – probably sober, a little excited, his hand drumming against his thigh. But then something ominous happened: the surveillance cameras stopped working. They simply died. Fortunately there were other witnesses – a young woman by the name of Agnes Sohlberg, for example, who was clearing up on the terrace.
Agnes had seen a middle-aged man come out of the hotel. She had not recognised him as Mikael Blomkvist, but then she had heard an older, slim gentleman in a light-coloured suit address him. The man had been sitting at the far end of the bar, with his back to her. Shortly afterwards she heard rapid footsteps, and maybe also the sound of someone crying out. When she turned she saw another man, a younger, sturdier fellow in a leather jacket and jeans.
At first she took him to be some kind person who had come rushing over to help. She had seen Blomkvist – or the man she later understood to be Blomkvist – collapse in the street, and she heard a voice refer to “an epileptic fit” in English. Since she did not have her mobile with her, she had run inside to call the emergency services.
After that they had to rely on other witnesses, including a married couple by the name of Kristofferson who reported having seen an ambulance coming out of Hovslagargatan. Blomkvist was lifted into the ambulance on a stretcher, and the couple would probably not have given it a second thought had they not been struck by the careless way in which his body was handled. And the way the men had jumped into the vehicle did not seem to them “natural”.
The ambulance, which turned out to have been stolen six days earlier in Norsborg, was later caught on camera on Klarabergsleden, heading north on the E4 motorway with sirens blaring. But then it disappeared from sight. Bublanski and his team were convinced the perpetrators had switched cars after that. Nothing was known for sure, however, except that Salander herself had alerted the emergency services. Bublanski was not happy with that.
How could Salander have known about the incident so soon? It made him suspicious that she was somehow connected with the assault, and he felt no better about it even after he’d spoken to her. He was glad, of course, that she had called; he was grateful for every piece of information. But he did not like what he heard in her voice – the rage, the pounding fury, and no matter how many times he said, “Keep out of this, let us handle it,” the words didn’t seem to get through. And he was certain she had not told him everything. He was convinced she was in the middle of an operation of her own, and he cursed when they hung up and cursed again now as he sat in the conference room with his colleagues Sonja Modig, Jerker Holmberg, Curt Svensson and Amanda Flod.
“What was that?” he said.
“I was wondering how Salander could have known so quickly about Blomkvist having been attacked,” Holmberg said.
“I thought I told you.”
“You said she’d done something to his telephone.”
“That’s right, she’d messed about with it – with his consent. So she could eavesdrop on him and see where he was, at least until they shut his mobile down.”
“What I really meant was, how was she able to react so fast,” Holmberg said. “It sounds … I don’t know, as if she’d just been hanging
about, waiting for something like this to happen.”
“She said she’d been afraid it would,” Bublanski said. “Like a worst-case scenario. Svavelsjö M.C. had been keeping Blomkvist under observation, both at Bellmansgatan and out at Sandhamn.”
“And we still don’t have anything on the club?”
“We woke up the president, Marko Sandström, this morning. But he just laughed at us. Said that you needed to be suicidal to go after Blomkvist. We’re trying to track down the other members and we’ll watch them. So far, we’ve not been able to link any of them to the incident, other than to note that several of them have been impossible to reach.”
“And we don’t know why Blomkvist was at the Lydmar in the first place?” Flod said.
“No, we’ve no idea. We’ve got people there now. But Blomkvist appears to have been very cagey of late. Even his colleagues at Millennium had no idea what he was up to. Erika Berger says he’s taking some sort of holiday. Apparently he’s mainly been working on his story about the Sherpa.”
“Which may have something to do with Forsell.”
“It may indeed, and that’s given Must the jitters, and Säpo too.”
“Could it be a foreign operation?” Svensson said.
“The fact that the surveillance cameras were hacked would suggest it. And I don’t like the way they used a stolen ambulance, that really feels like a provocation, but in all likelihood—”
“—there’s a link to Salander,” Modig concluded.
“That’s what we all think,” Holmberg said.
“Perhaps we do,” Bublanski said, and he sank deep in thought. What was Salander hiding from him?
Salander had not told Bublanski about the Strandvägen apartment. She was hoping Camilla would lead her to Blomkvist, and she did not want the police to mess that up for her. But for now, Camilla was staying put. Maybe she was waiting for the same thing as Salander, the thing that Salander dreaded: images of Blomkvist being tortured and a demand for an exchange, her for him or, worse, pictures of Blomkvist dead and threats to kill others close to her unless she gave herself up to them.
During the night, Salander had been in touch with Annika Giannini, Dragan Armansky, Miriam Wu and a couple of others – even Paulina, who presumably nobody knew about – and had told them to go somewhere where they would be safe. It hadn’t been pleasant, but she had done what she had to do.
She did not have a clue where they had taken Blomkvist, except that it appeared to be northwards, which is why she was staying at the Clarion Hotel at Arlanda airport, in the same direction at least. But she was as unaware of the room she was in or of the hotel as she was of everything else, and she had not slept a wink.
She had spent hours at the desk trying to find some trace, some opening, and it was not until now, when finally she got a signal, that she sat up in her chair. Camilla was leaving the apartment at Strandvägen. That’s my girl, she thought. Please be a little careless now, and take me to him. But that was hoping for too much. Camilla had Bogdanov, and Bogdanov was in the same league as Plague.
So even if her sister did show her the way to some place, it wouldn’t necessarily be a breakthrough. It could equally well be a trap. An attempt to draw her off. She had to be prepared for everything, but now … her eyes were fixed on the map. The car carrying Camilla was taking the same route as the ambulance had yesterday, heading north on the E4 motorway. That was promising. It had to be. Salander packed her things and went down to check out, before tearing off on her Kawasaki.
Catrin Lindås wrapped herself in a bathrobe and went to open the door. She found a uniformed policeman standing outside, a young man with blond, neatly parted hair, and she stammered a nervous “Good morning”.
“We want to speak to people in this hotel who may have seen or been in contact with the journalist Mikael Blomkvist,” the police officer said, and immediately she felt that he was suspicious, maybe even hostile.
His eyes beamed with confidence and he stood very straight, as if to show how tall and powerful he was.
“What’s happened?” she said, and the fear was plain in her voice.
The policeman came closer and looked her up and down in a way she recognised only too well. She had encountered it so many times when walking around town, the look that wanted to both undress her and do her harm.
“What is your name?”
That was part of the provocation. She could see that he knew perfectly well who she was.
“Catrin Lindås,” she said.
He wrote it down in a notebook.
“You’ve been with him here, haven’t you? Did you spend the night together?”
What’s that got to do with it? she wanted to shout. But she was frightened, and she stepped back into the room and explained that Blomkvist had already left by the time she woke that morning.
“Did you check in using a false name?”
She tried to breathe calmly and wondered if it would even be possible to have a rational conversation with him, especially now that he had high-handedly marched into the room.
“And do you have a name?” she said.
“What?”
“I don’t seem to remember you introducing yourself.”
“Inspector Carl Wernersson, from Norrmalm police.”
“Good, Carl,” she said. “In that case you can perhaps begin by telling me what’s going on?”
“Mikael Blomkvist was attacked outside this hotel during the night and abducted, so you’ll appreciate that we’re taking this very seriously indeed.”
She felt as if the walls were closing in on her.
“My God,” she said.
“So it’s of the utmost importance that you give us a truthful account of what happened before that.”
She sat down on the bed.
“Is he hurt?”
“We don’t know. You haven’t answered my question,” he said.
Her heart was pounding and she fumbled for words.
“He was going to an important meeting this morning, but I’ve just found out that he never showed up.”
“What sort of meeting?”
She closed her eyes. Why was she being such an idiot? She had sworn not to tell anyone about it. But she was terrified and confused, her brain was not functioning properly.
“I can’t tell you, I’m protecting a source,” she said.
“So you’re refusing to cooperate?”
She was struggling to breathe and looked out of the window, groping for a way out of the situation. But then Wernersson inadvertently helped her by staring at her breasts, and that made her livid.
“I’d be happy to cooperate. But before I do, I want to speak to a person with a rudimentary knowledge of the law on informant protection, and who at least tries to show some respect for people who’ve received shocking news about someone they’re close to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m telling you to contact your superiors and get the hell out of here.”
Wernersson looked as if he wanted to arrest her right away.
“Now,” she said, angrier by the second, and he did actually mutter “O.K.”, although he could not resist adding:
“But you’re staying here.”
Without answering, she opened the door to show him out, then sat on the bed in stunned silence. A buzzing from her mobile jerked her back to life. It was a news flash from Svenska Dagbladet:
CELEBRATED JOURNALIST ASSAULTED AND
ABDUCTED OUTSIDE HOTEL LYDMAR IN STOCKHOLM
For a few minutes she was absorbed by the reports. There were banner headlines everywhere but precious little substance in the stories themselves, only the information that he was said to have been taken away in an ambulance, an ambulance no-one had called. It sounded … unbelievable. What the hell should she do? She wanted to scream. Then something came back to her, something she had heard in the night: a sound from the bathroom, a whispering, she thought, an exclamation from Mikael. She may even have whispe
red back: “What are you up to?”
Or had she been dreaming? It didn’t matter. The whispering could have had something to do with his leaving their room. The reports said that he had been abducted outside the hotel at around 2.00 a.m., which would mean – she was trying to think clearly – that something had been worrying him. He had gone off, leaving her alone, and had immediately been attacked. Had it all been a trap, a trick to get him to go out? Shit, shit. What was going on? What had happened?
She thought of the beggar, and of Rebecka Forsell and the desperate sound of her voice, and Mikael’s excitement last night about the interview. To hell with that moron of a policeman. Resolute, she dressed and packed her belongings, then went down and paid the bill at reception before being spirited away in a black diplomatic car from the British Embassy that was waiting for her. There had been no further sign of the odious policeman.
CHAPTER 30
28.viii
It was hot in the high-ceilinged room, a fire was burning in a large gas furnace. No daylight penetrated the building, which was lit only by a few spotlights. The large glass windows were tinted or covered in soot, and Blomkvist let his eyes dart around the building, making out the concrete beams and iron structures, the splintered glass on the floor and the gleaming metal edges of the furnace in which he saw his own reflection.
He had ended up at some abandoned industrial site, possibly an old glassworks which must be some distance from Stockholm, but he had not the slightest idea where. The journey had not been short, he thought. They had changed cars once or twice, although he had been so heavily drugged he had only fragmentary memories of the night and the morning. And now he was here, strapped to a camp bed or stretcher, not far from the furnace.
“Help! For Christ’s sake, is anybody there?!” he shouted out.
Not that he believed it would do him any good. But he had to do something other than writhe and sweat under the leather straps, feeling the heat of the fire on his feet. Otherwise he would go mad. The furnace hissed like a snake and he was terrified. His shirt was soaked in sweat and his mouth was dry, and now … What was that? He could hear a crunching, the sound of glass shards being crushed. Footsteps were approaching, and he sensed at once that they brought no hope of relief. On the contrary, they seemed to be ambling along with an exaggerated slowness, accompanied by whistling.
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 26