The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) (35 page)

Now she was dreaming about her father beating her mother, and even then she could feel that old, fierce rage from her childhood. She felt it so keenly that it woke her up again. It was 3.45 and those scraps of paper on which she and August had written their numbers were still lying on the bedside table. Outside, snow was falling. But the storm seemed to have calmed and nothing unusual could be heard, just the wind howling and rustling through the trees.

Yet she felt uneasy, and at first she thought it was the dream lying like a fine mesh over the room. Then she shuddered. The bed next to her was empty – August was gone. She shot out of bed without making a sound, grabbed her Beretta from the bag on the floor and crept into the large room next to the terrace.

The next moment she breathed a sigh of relief. August was sitting at the table, busy with something. Without wanting to disturb him she leaned over his shoulder and saw that he was not writing new prime-number factorizations, or drawing fresh scenes of abuse. He was sketching chess squares reflected in the mirrors of a wardrobe, and above them could be made out a threatening figure with his hand outstretched. The killer was taking shape. Salander smiled, and then she withdrew.

Back in the bedroom she sat on the bed, removed her pullover and the bandage and inspected the bullet wound. It didn’t look good, and she still felt weak. She swallowed another couple of antibiotic pills and tried to rest. She might even have gone back to sleep for a few moments. She was aware of a vague sensation that she had seen both Zala and Camilla in her dream, and the next second she became aware of a presence, though she had no idea what. A bird flapped its wings outside. She could hear August’s laboured breathing in the kitchen. She was just about to get up when a scream pierced the air.

By the time Blomkvist left the office in the early morning hours to take a taxi to the Grand Hôtel, he still had no news of Zander. He tried again to persuade himself that he had been overreacting, that any moment now his colleague would be calling from some friend’s place. But the worry would not go away. He was vaguely aware that it had started snowing again, and that a woman’s shoe had been left lying on the pavement. He took out his Samsung and called Salander on the Redphone app.

Salander did not pick up, and that did not make him any calmer. He tried once more and sent a text from the Threema app:

Then he caught sight of a taxi coming down from Hökens gata and noticed the driver give a start when he saw him. At that moment Blomkvist looked dangerously determined. It did not help that he failed to respond to the driver’s attempts to chat. He just sat back in the darkness, his eyes bright with worry.

Stockholm was more or less deserted. The storm had abated but there were still white-crested waves on the water. Blomkvist looked across to the Grand Hôtel on the other side and wondered if he should forget about the meeting with Mr Needham and drive straight out to Salander instead, or at least arrange for a police car to go there. No, he couldn’t do that without warning her. Another leak would be disastrous. He opened the Threema app again and tapped in:

I
get
help?>

No answer. Of course there was no answer. He paid the fare and climbed out of the taxi, lost in thought. By the time he was pushing through the revolving doors of the hotel it was 4.20 in the morning – he was forty minutes early. He had never been forty minutes early for anything. But he was burning inside and, before going to the reception desk to hand in his mobiles, he called Berger. He told her to try to get hold of Salander and to keep in touch with the police.

“If you hear anything, call the Grand Hôtel and ask for Mr Needham’s room.”

“And who’s he?”

“Someone who wants to meet me.”

“At this time?”

Needham was in room 654. The door opened and there stood a man reeking of sweat and rage. There was about as much resemblance to the figure in the fishing photograph as there would be between a hungover dictator and his stylized statue. Needham had a drink in his hand and looked grim, dishevelled and a little bit like a bulldog.

“Mr Needham,” Blomkvist said.

“Ed,” Needham said. “I’m sorry to haul you over here at this ungodly hour, but it’s urgent.”

“So it would seem,” Blomkvist said drily.

“Do you have any idea what I want to talk to you about?”

Blomkvist shook his head and sat down on a sofa. There was a bottle of gin and some small bottles of Schweppes tonic on the desk next to it.

“No indeed, why would you?” Needham said. “On the other hand it’s impossible to know with guys like you. I’ve checked you out. You should know that I hate to flatter people – it leaves a bad taste in my mouth – but you’re pretty outstanding in your profession, aren’t you?”

Blomkvist gave a forced smile. “Can we just get to the point?” he said.

“Just relax. I’ll be crystal clear. I assume you know where I work.”

“Not exactly,” he said truthfully.

“In Puzzle Palace, SIG.INT. City. I work for the world’s spittoon.”

“The N.S.A.”

“Damn right. Do you have any idea how fucking insane you have to be to mess with us, Mikael Blomkvist? Do you?”

“I have a pretty good idea,” he said.

“And do you know where I think your girlfriend really belongs?”

“No.”

“She belongs behind bars. For life!”

Blomkvist gave what he hoped was a calm, composed little smile. But in fact his mind was spinning. Did Salander hack the N.S.A.? The mere thought terrified him. Not only was she in hiding, with killers on the hunt for her. Was she also going to have the entire U.S. intelligence shock troops descend on her? It sounded … well, how did it sound? It sounded totally off the wall.

One of Salander’s abiding characteristics was that she never did anything without first carefully analysing the potential consequences. She did not follow impulses or whims and therefore he could not imagine she would take such an idiotic risk if there was the slightest chance of being found out. Sometimes she put herself in danger, that was true, but there was always a balance between costs and benefits. He refused to believe that she had got herself into the N.S.A.’s systems, only to allow herself to be outwitted by the splenetic bulldog standing in front of him.

“I think you’re jumping to conclusions,” he said.

“Dream on, dude. But you heard me use the word ‘really’ just then. Some word, hey? Can be used in all sorts of ways. I don’t really drink in the mornings, and yet here I am with a glass in my hand, ha ha! What I’m trying to say is that you might be able to save your girlfriend’s skin if you promise to help me with one or two things.”

“I’m listening,” he said.

“Peachy. Let me begin by asking for a guarantee that you’ll not quote me as your source.”

Blomkvist looked at him in surprise. He had not expected that.

“Are you some kind of whistleblower?”

“God help me, no. I’m a loyal old bloodhound.”

“But you’re not acting officially on behalf of the N.S.A.”

“You could say that right now I have my own agenda. Sort of doing my own thing. Well, how about it?”

“I won’t quote you.”

“Great. I also want to make sure we agree that what I’m going to tell you now will stay between us. You might be wondering why the hell I’m telling a fantastic story to an investigative journalist, only to have him keep his trap shut.”

“Good question.”

“I have my reasons. And I trust you – don’t ask me why. I’m betting that you want to protect your girlfriend, and you think the real story is elsewhere. Maybe I’ll even help you with that, if you’re prepared to cooperate.”

“That remains to be seen,” Blomkvist said stiffly.

“Well, a few days ago we had a data breach on our intranet, our NSANet. You know about that, don’t you?”

“More or less.”

“NSANet was created after 9/11, to improve coordination between our own intelligence services on the one hand and those in other English-speaking countries – known as the Five Eyes. It’s a closed system, with its own routers, portals and bridges, and it’s completely separate from the rest of the Internet. We administer our signals intelligence from there via satellite and fibre-optic cables and that’s also where we have our big databases and store classified analyses and reports – from Moray-rated documents, the least sensitive, all the way up to Umbra Ultra Top Secret, which even the President of the United States isn’t allowed to see. The system is run out of Texas, which by the way is idiotic. But it’s still my baby. Let me tell you, Mikael, I worked my ass off to create it. Hammered away at it day and night so that no fucker could misuse it, never mind hack it. Every single little anomaly sets alarm bells ringing, plus there’s a whole staff of independent experts monitoring the system. These days you can’t do a goddamn thing on the web without leaving footprints. At least that’s the theory. Everything is logged and analysed. You shouldn’t be able to touch a single key without it triggering a notification. But …”

“Somebody did.”

“Yes, and maybe I could have made my peace with it. There are always weak spots, we can always do better. Weak spots keep us on our toes. But it wasn’t just the fact that she managed to get in. It was how she did it. She forced our server and created an advanced bridge, and got into the intranet via one of our systems administrators. That alone was a damn masterpiece. But that wasn’t all, not by a long chalk: then the bitch turned herself into a ghost user.”

“A what?”

“A ghost. She flew around in there without anyone noticing.”

“And your alarm bells didn’t go off?”

“That damn genius introduced a Trojan unlike anything else we knew, because otherwise our system would have identified it right away. The malware then kept upgrading her status. She got more and more access and soaked up highly classified passwords and codes and started to link and match records and databases, and suddenly – bingo!”

“Bingo what?”

“She found what she was looking for, and then she stopped wanting to be invisible – now she wanted to show us what she’d found, and only then did my alarm bells go off: exactly when she wanted them to.”

“And what did she find?”

“She found our hypocrisy, Mikael, our double-dealing, and that’s why I’m sitting here with you and not on my fat ass in Maryland, sending the Marines after her. She was like a thief breaking into a house just to point out that it was already full of stolen goods, and the minute we found that out she became truly dangerous – so dangerous that some of our senior people wanted to let her off.”

“But not you.”

“Not me. I wanted to tie her to a lamp post and flay her alive. But I had no choice except to give up my pursuit, and that, Mikael, seriously pissed me off. I may look calm now, but you should have seen me … Jesus!”

“You were hopping mad.”

“Damn right I was, and that’s why I’ve had you come here at this godforsaken hour. I need to get hold of Wasp before she flees the country.”

“Why would she run?”

“Because she’s gone from one crazy thing to the next, hasn’t she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I think you do.”

“And what makes you think she’s your hacker in the first place?”

“That, Mikael, is what I’m going to lay on you now.”

But he got no further.

The room telephone rang and Needham picked up right away. It was reception looking for Mikael Blomkvist, and Needham handed him the receiver. He soon gathered that the journalist had been given some alarming news, so it was no surprise when the Swede muttered a confused apology and ran out of the room. But Needham would not let him get away that easily, and so he grabbed his coat and chased after him.

Blomkvist was racing down the corridor like a sprinter. Needham did not know what was going on, but if it had something to do with the Wasp/Balder story, he wanted to be there. He had some trouble keeping up – the journalist was in too much of a hurry to wait for the lift and instead hurtled down the stairs. By the time Needham reached the ground floor, panting, Blomkvist had already retrieved his mobiles and was engrossed in another conversation while he ran on towards the revolving doors and out into the street.

“What’s happening?” Needham said as the journalist ended his call and was trying to hail a taxi on the street.

“Problems!” Blomkvist said.

“I can drive you.”

“Like hell you can. You’ve been drinking.”

“At least we can take my car.”

Blomkvist slowed his pace and turned to Needham.

“What is it you want?”

“I want us to help each other.”

“You’ll have to catch your hacker on your own.”

“I no longer have the authority to catch anybody.”

“O.K., so where’s the car?”

As they ran to Needham’s rental car parked over by the Nationalmuseum, Blomkvist hurriedly explained that they were heading out to the Stockholm archipelago, towards Ingarö. He would get directions on the way and was not planning to observe any speed limits.

24.xi, Morning

August screamed, and in the same instant Salander heard footsteps, rapid footsteps along the side of the house. She grabbed her pistol and jumped to her feet. She felt terrible, but ignored it.

As she rushed over to the doorway she saw a large man appear on the terrace. For a moment she thought she had a split-second advantage, but the figure did not stop to open the glass doors. He charged straight through them with his weapon drawn and shot at the boy.

Salander returned fire, or perhaps she had already done so, she did not know. She was not even conscious of the moment in which she started running towards the man. She only knew that she crashed into him with numbing force and now lay on top of him right by the round table where the boy had been sitting moments before. Without a second’s hesitation she headbutted the man.

The contact was so violent that her head rang, and she swayed as she got to her feet. The room was spinning and there was blood on her shirt. Had she been hit again? She had no time to think. Where was August? No-one at the table, only pencils and drawings, crayons, prime-number calculations. Where the hell was he? She heard a whimpering by the refrigerator and, yes, there he was, sitting and shaking, his knees drawn up to his chest. He must have had time to throw himself to the floor.

Salander was about to rush over to him when she heard new, worrying sounds from outside, voices and branches snapping. Others were approaching, there was no time to lose. They had to be away from here. In a blinding flash she visualized the surrounding terrain and raced over to August. “Come on!” she said. August did not budge. Salander picked him up in one swift movement, her face twisted in pain. Every movement hurt. But they had to get away and August must have understood that too because he wriggled out of her grasp. So she sprang over to the table, grabbed her computer and August’s coat, and made for the terrace, past the man on the floor who raised himself groggily and tried to catch hold of August’s leg as he ran alongside her.

Salander considered killing him. Instead she kicked him hard in the throat and stomach and threw away his weapon. Then she ran across the terrace with August and down towards the steep rocky slope. But suddenly she thought of the drawing. She had not seen how far the boy had got with it. Should she go back? No, the others would be here any moment. They had to get away. But still … the drawing was also a weapon, and the cause of all this madness. She left August with her computer on the rock ledge she had identified the night before. She then launched herself back up the slope and into the house and looked on the table. At first she could not see it. Drawings of that bastard Westman were everywhere, and rows of prime numbers.

But there – there it was, and above the chess squares and the mirrors there was now a pale figure with a sharply defined scar on his forehead, which Salander by now recognized only too well. It was the same man who was lying on the floor in front of her, moaning. She whipped out her mobile, took a photograph and sent it to Bublanski and Modig. She had even scribbled a line at the top of the paper. But a second later she realized that was a mistake.

They were surrounded.

Salander had sent the same word to his Samsung as she had to Berger: <
CRISIS>
. It hardly left room for misunderstanding, not coming from Salander. However Blomkvist looked at it, it could only mean that she and August had been discovered, and at worst they were under attack even now. He floored the accelerator as he passed Stadsgårdskajen and emerged onto the Värmdö road.

He was driving a brand-new Audi A8, with Needham sitting next to him. Needham looked grim, and every now and then tapped something into his mobile. Blomkvist was not sure why he had allowed him to come along – maybe he wanted to discover what the man had on Salander, or no, there was something else as well. Maybe Needham could even be useful. In any case he could hardly make the situation any worse. The police had by now been alerted, but he doubted they would able to assemble a unit quickly enough – especially as they were sceptical about the lack of information. Berger had been the focal point, trying to keep them all in contact with each other, and she was the only one who knew the way. He needed all the help he could get.

He was approaching Danviksbron. Needham said something, he did not hear what. His thoughts were elsewhere. He thought of Zander – what had they done to him? Why the hell had he not come out for a beer? Blomkvist tried his number again. He tried calling Salander too. But nobody answered.

“Do you want me to tell you what we have on your hacker?” Needham said.

“Yes … why not?”

But they did not get anywhere this time either. Blomkvist’s mobile rang. Bublanski.

“I hope you realize that you and I are going to have a lot to talk about later, and you can count on there being legal consequences.”

“I hear you.”

“But for now I’m calling to give you some information. We know that Lisbeth Salander was alive at 4.22. Was that before or after she texted you?”

“Before, it must have been before.”

“O.K.”

“How can you be so specific about the time?”

“She sent us something extremely interesting. A drawing. I have to say, Mikael, it exceeded our hopes.”

“So she got the boy to draw.”

“Oh yes. I have no idea what technical issues might arise in terms of admissibility of evidence, if any, or what objections a clever defence lawyer might raise. But as far as I’m concerned there’s no doubt this is the murderer. It’s incredibly vivid, with that extraordinary mathematical precision again. In fact there’s also an equation written at the bottom of the page, I have no idea if it’s relevant to the case. But I sent the drawing to Interpol. If the man is anywhere in their database, he’s toast.”

“Are you going to send it to the press as well?”

“We’re debating that.”

“When will you be at the scene?”

“As soon as possible … hold on a second!”

Blomkvist could hear another telephone ringing in the background, and for a minute or so Bublanski was gone on another call. When he returned, he said briefly:

“We’ve had reports of gunfire out there. It doesn’t sound good.”

Blomkvist took a deep breath. “Any news on Andrei?” he said.

“We’ve traced his mobile signal to a base station in Gamla Stan, but no further. We’ve had no signal at all for a while now, as if the mobile has been smashed or just stopped working.”

Blomkvist drove even faster; fortunately the roads were empty at that hour. At first he said very little to Needham, just a brief account of what was going on, but in the end he could not hold back. He needed something else to think about.

“So what is it you think you’ve found out?”

“About Wasp? For a long time, zip. We were convinced that we’d reached the end of the line,” Needham said. “We’d left no stone unturned, and still got nowhere. In a way it made sense.”

“How so?”

“A hacker capable of a breach like that should also be able to cover all tracks. I realized pretty soon we wouldn’t get anywhere by conventional means. So I skipped all the forensic bullshit and went straight for the big question: who had the chops to pull this off? That question was our best hope. There’s hardly anyone out there with that level of ability. In that sense, you could say that the hacker’s skill worked against them. Plus, we had analysed the rootkit itself, and that …” Needham looked down at his mobile.

“Yes?”

“It had artistic qualities. Personal style, you might say. Now we just had to find its author, and so we started to send posts to the hacker community, and very soon there was one name, one handle, which came up time after time. Can you guess which one?”

“Maybe.”

“It was Wasp. Sure, there were other names, but Wasp stood out. I ended up hearing so much mythical bullshit about this person that I was dying to crack their identity, and we went right back in time. We read every word Wasp had written online, studied every operation that had Wasp’s signature on it. Soon we were certain that Wasp was a woman, and we guessed that she was Swedish. Several of the early posts were written in Swedish, which isn’t much to go on. But since there was a Swedish connection in the organization she was tracking, and Frans Balder was Swedish, it was at least a good place to start. I got in touch with the N.D.R.E., and they searched their records, and then in fact …”

“What?”

“They had a breakthrough. Many years earlier they’d investigated a hacker operation that used that very handle, Wasp. It was so long ago that Wasp wasn’t yet even particularly good at encryption.”

“What happened?”

“Wasp had been looking for data on individuals who’d defected from other countries’ intelligence services, and that was enough to trigger the N.D.R.E.’s warning system. Their investigation led them to a psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala, to a computer belonging to the head physician there, a man named Teleborian. Apparently he’d done some work for the Swedish Security Police, so he was above suspicion. Instead the N.D.R.E. concentrated on some mental-health nurses who were targeted because they were … well, to be blunt about it, immigrants. It was such a stupid, blinkered strategy. Anyway, nothing came of it.”

“I can imagine.”

“So I asked a guy at the N.D.R.E. to send over all the old material, and we sifted through it with a completely different mindset. You know, you don’t have to be big and fat and shave in the mornings to be a good hacker. I’ve met twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who are crazy good. It was obvious to me that we should look at every child in the clinic at the time. I had three of my guys investigate each one of them, inside and out, and do you know what we found? One of the children was the daughter of former spy and arch-villain Zalachenko, who was known to our colleagues at the C.I.A., and then everything got really interesting. As you probably know, there are some overlaps between the network the hacker was investigating and Zalachenko’s old crime syndicate.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean it was Wasp who hacked you.”

“Of course not. But we took a closer look at this girl, and what can I say? She has an interesting background, doesn’t she? A lot of information about her in the public record has been mysteriously deleted, but we still found more than enough and … I don’t know, I may be wrong, but I get the feeling we’re on the right track. Mikael, you don’t know shit about me. But I know what it’s like for a kid to see extreme violence at close quarters. And I know what it’s like when society doesn’t lift a finger to punish the guilty party. It hurts like hell, and I’m not at all surprised that most children who experience it go under. They turn into destructive bastards themselves.”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“But just a few grow to be as strong as bears, Mikael, and they stand up and fight back. Wasp was one of those, wasn’t she?”

Blomkvist nodded pensively and pressed down on the accelerator a little more.

“They locked her up and kept trying to break her. But she kept coming back, and do you know what I think?”

“No.”

“She got stronger each time. She became positively lethal. She hasn’t forgotten a single thing that happened. It’s all etched into her, isn’t it? And maybe that’s at the bottom of this whole goddamn mess.”

“What is it you want?” Blomkvist said bluntly.

“I want what Wasp wants. I want to set some things right.”

“Plus get your hands on the hacker.”

“I want to meet her and give her a piece of my mind and plug every last damn hole in our security. But above all I want to get my own back on certain people who wouldn’t let me finish my job because Wasp exposed them. I have reason to believe you’re going to help me with that.”

“Why so?”

“Because you’re a fine reporter. Fine reporters don’t want dirty secrets to go on being dirty secrets.”

“And Wasp?”

“Wasp is going to get a chance to do her worst. You’re going to help me with that too.”

“Or else?”

“Or else I’ll find a way of putting her inside, and making her life hell again, I swear.”

“But for now all you want to do is talk to her?”

“No fucker is going to be allowed to hack into my system again, so I need to understand exactly how she did it. I want you to give her that message. I’m prepared to let your girlfriend go free if she’ll sit down with me and explain.”

“I’ll tell her. Let’s just hope …”

“That she’s still alive,” Needham said. They turned left at high speed in the direction of Ingaröstrand.

It was rare for Holtser to get things so wrong.

He had this romantic delusion that you could tell from a distance if a man was likely to succeed in close combat. That was why he had not been surprised when Kira’s attempted seduction of Blomkvist had failed. Orlov and Bogdanov had been completely confident. But Holtser had had his doubts even though he had only seen the journalist for one giddy second in Saltsjöbaden. Blomkvist looked like a problem. He looked like a man who could not be fooled or broken so easily.

With the younger journalist it was different. He looked like the archetypal weakling, yet nothing could have been further from the truth. Zander had resisted for longer than anyone Holtser had ever tortured. Despite excruciating pain he had refused to break. His eyes shone with a grim determination which seemed buttressed by a higher principle, and at one point Holtser thought they would have to give up, that Zander would rather endure any suffering than talk. It was not until Kira solemnly promised that both Berger and Blomkvist from
Millennium
would be made to suffer as well that Zander finally caved in.

By then it was 3.30 in the morning. Holtser knew that he would always remember the moment. Snow was falling on the skylights. The young man’s face was dried out and hollow-eyed. Blood had splashed up from his chest and flecked his mouth and cheeks. His lips, which for a long time had been covered with tape, were split and oozing. He was a wreck, but still you could tell that he was a beautiful young man.

Holtser thought of Olga – how would she have felt about him? Wasn’t this journalist just the kind of educated man she liked, someone who fights injustice, takes the side of beggars and outcasts? He thought about that, and about other things in his own life. After that he made the sign of the cross, the Russian cross, where one way leads to heaven and the other to hell, and then he glanced over at Kira. She was lovelier than ever.