The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) (36 page)

Her eyes burned with light. She was sitting on a stool by the bed wearing an elegant blue dress – which had largely escaped the bloodstains – and said something in Swedish to Zander, something which sounded soft and tender. Then she took him by the hand. He gripped hers in return. He had nowhere else to turn for comfort. The wind howled outside in the alley. Kira nodded and smiled at Holtser. Snowflakes fell on the window ledge.

Afterwards they were sitting together in a Land Rover on the way out to Ingarö. Holtser felt empty, and was not happy with the way things were going. But there was no getting away from the fact that his own mistake had led them there, so he sat quietly, listening to Kira. She was strangely excited and spoke with searing hatred of the woman they were about to confront. Holtser did not think it was a good sign, and if he could have brought himself to do so he would have urged her to turn back and get the hell out of the country.

But he said nothing as the snow fell and they drove on in the darkness. Kira’s sparkling, cold eyes frightened him, but he pushed away the thought. He had to give her credit at least – she had been amazingly quick to put two and two together.

Not only had she worked out who had hurtled in to save the boy on Sveavägen. She had also guessed who would know where the boy and the woman had disappeared to, and the person she came up with was none other than Mikael Blomkvist. They were baffled by her reasoning. Why would a reputable Swedish journalist harbour a person who appeared from nowhere and abducted a child from a crime scene? But the more they examined the theory, the more it held together. Not only did the woman – whose name was Lisbeth Salander – have close ties to the reporter, but something also happened at the
Millennium
offices.

After the murder in Saltsjöbaden, Bogdanov had hacked into Blomkvist’s computer to try to find out why Balder had summoned him to his home in the middle of the night. Getting access to his email had been easy enough. But that had now stopped. When was the last time it had been impossible for Bogdanov to read someone’s emails? Never, so far as Holtser was aware. Blomkvist had suddenly become much more careful – right after the woman and the boy disappeared from Sveavägen.

That in itself was no guarantee that the journalist knew where they now were. But as time went on there were more indications that the theory might be right, and in any case Kira did not seem to need cast-iron evidence. She wanted to go for Blomkvist. Or, if not him, then someone else at the magazine. More than anything she was obsessive in her determination to track down the woman and the child.

Maybe Holtser could not understand the subtleties of Kira’s motives. But it was for his benefit that they were going to do away with the boy. Kira chose to take significant risks for Holtser, and he was grateful, he really was, even though now in the car he felt uneasy.

He tried to draw strength from thinking about Olga. Whatever happened, she must not wake up and see a drawing of her father on all the front pages. He tried to reassure himself that the hardest part was behind them. Assuming Zander had given them the right location, the job should be straightforward. They were three heavily armed men, four if you counted Bogdanov, who spent most of the time staring at his computer as usual.

The team consisted of Holtser, Bogdanov, Orlov and Dennis Wilton, a gangster who had been a member of Svavelsjö M.C. but who now worked for Kira. Four men against one woman who was probably asleep, and was also protecting a child. It shouldn’t be a problem, not at all. But Kira was almost manic:

“Don’t underestimate Salander!”

She said it so many times that even Bogdanov, who always agreed with everything she said, began to get irritated. Of course Holtser had seen how fit and fast and fearless the woman had been on Sveavägen. But the way Kira described her, she must be some kind of superwoman. It was ridiculous. Holtser had never met a woman who could remotely be a match for him – or even for Orlov – in combat. Still, he promised to be careful. First he would go up and check out the terrain and prepare a strategy. They would not be drawn into a trap. He stressed this many times over, and when finally they arrived at an inlet next to a rocky slope and a jetty, he took command. He told the others to get ready in the shelter of the car while he went ahead to identify the house.

Holtser liked early mornings. He liked the silence and the feeling of transition in the air. Now he was leaning forward as he walked, and listening. It was reassuringly dark – no lights were on. He left the jetty behind him and came to a wooden fence with a rickety gate, right next to an overgrown prickly bush. He opened the gate and started to climb up the steep wooden steps holding the handrail on the right, and soon he was able to make out the house above.

It lay hidden behind pine trees and aspens and was only a dark outline, with a terrace on the south side. On the terrace were some glass doors which they would have no trouble breaking through. At first sight he saw no serious difficulty. He was moving almost soundlessly and for a moment he considered finishing off the job himself. Maybe it was even his moral responsibility, and it should be no more difficult than other jobs he had done. On the contrary.

There were no policemen this time, no guards, nor any sign of an alarm system. True, he did not have his assault rifle with him, but then there was no need for it. The rifle was excessive, the result of Kira’s heated imagination. He had his pistol, his Remington, and that was more than enough. Suddenly – without his usual careful planning – he started moving along the side of the house, up to the terrace and the glass doors.

Then he stiffened, without at first knowing why – it could have been a sound, a movement, a danger he had only half sensed. He looked up at the rectangular window above him, but from his position he could not see into it. He kept still, now less and less sure of himself. Could it be the wrong house?

He resolved to get closer and peer in, and then … he was transfixed in the darkness. He was being observed. Those eyes which once before had looked at him were now staring glassily in his direction. That was when he should have reacted. He should have sprinted around to the terrace, gone straight in and shot the boy. But again he hesitated. He could not bring himself to draw his weapon. Faced with that look, he was lost.

The boy let out a shrill scream which seemed to set the window vibrating, and only then did Holtser tear himself out of his paralysis and race up onto the terrace. Without a moment’s reflection he hurtled straight through the glass doors and fired with what he thought was great precision, but he never found out whether he hit his target.

An explosive shadow-like figure came at him with such speed that he hardly had time to brace himself. He knew that he fired another shot and that someone shot back. In the next instant he slammed onto the floor with his full weight, a young woman tumbling over him with a rage in her eyes that was beyond anything he had ever seen. He reacted instinctively and tried to shoot again. But the woman was like a wild animal. She threw her head back and … Crack!

When he came to he had a taste of blood in his mouth and his pullover was sticky and wet. He must have been hit. Just then the boy and the woman passed him, and he tried to grab hold of the boy’s leg. At least he thought he did. But suddenly he was gasping for breath.

He no longer understood what was going on. Except that he was beaten, but by whom? By a woman? That insight became a part of his pain as he lay on the floor amidst glass and his own blood, breathing heavily, his eyes shut. He hoped it would be over soon. When he opened his eyes again he was surprised to see the woman still there. Had she not just left? No, she was standing by the table, he could see her thin boyish legs. He tried his utmost to get up. He looked for his weapon, and at the same time heard voices through the broken window, and then he moved once more to attack the woman.

But before he could do anything the woman exploded into motion and stormed out. From the terrace she threw herself headlong into the trees. Shots resounded in the dark and he muttered to himself, “Kill the bastards.” But it was all he could do to get to his feet and he cast a dull glance at the table in front of him.

There was a mass of crayons and paper which he looked at without really taking it all in. Then it was as if a claw had taken hold of his heart. He saw an evil demon with a pale face raising his hand to kill. It took a second or so for him to realize that the demon was himself, and he shuddered.

Yet he could not take his eyes off the image. Only then did he notice something scribbled at the top:

Mailed to police 4.22
.

24.xi, Morning

When Aram Barzani of the Rapid Response Unit made his way into Gabriella Grane’s house at 4.52 he saw a large man dressed in black spreadeagled on the floor next to the round table.

He approached cautiously. The house seemed to have been abandoned. But he was not taking any risks. There were recent reports of a fierce gunfight up at the house and he could hear the excited voices of his colleagues outside on the steep rock slope.

“Here!” they shouted. “Here!”

Barzani did not understand what was going on, and for a moment he hesitated. Should he go to them? He decided to see first what condition the man on the floor was in. There was broken glass and blood all around, and the table was strewn with torn-up pieces of paper and crushed crayons. The man on the ground was crossing himself feebly. He was mumbling something. Probably a prayer. It sounded Russian; Barzani caught the word “Olga”. He told the man that a medical team was on its way.

“They were sisters,” the man said in English.

But it sounded so confused that Barzani attached no importance to it. Instead he searched through the man’s clothes, made sure that he was unarmed, and thought he had probably been shot in the stomach. His pullover was soaked in blood, and he looked alarmingly pale. Barzani asked what had happened. He got no reply, not at first. Then the man gasped out another strange sentence.

“My soul was captured in a drawing,” he said, and seemed to be about to lose consciousness.

Aram stayed for a few minutes to watch him, but when he heard from the ambulance crew he left the man and went down to the rocky slope. He wanted to discover what his colleagues had been shouting about. The snow was still falling and it was icy underfoot. Down by the water voices could be heard and the sound of more cars arriving. It was still dark and hard to see and there were many uneven rocks and straggly pines. The landscape was dramatic and steep. It could not have been easy to fight in this terrain and Barzani was gripped with foreboding. He noticed that it had become strangely quiet.

But his colleagues were not far away behind an overgrown aspen. He felt afraid – unusual for him – when he saw them staring down at the ground. What had they seen? Was the autistic boy dead?

He walked over slowly, thinking about his own boys, six and nine now. They were crazy about football – did nothing else, talked about nothing else. Björn and Anders. He and Dilvan had given them Swedish names because they had thought it would make their lives easier. What kind of people come out here to kill a child? He was gripped by a sudden fury. But in the next moment he breathed a sigh of relief.

There was no boy there, but two men lying on the ground, apparently both shot in the stomach. One of them – a brutal-looking type with pockmarked skin and a stubby boxer’s nose – tried to get up, but was easily pushed down again. His face betrayed his humiliation and his right hand was shaking with pain or rage. The other man, who was wearing a leather jacket and had his hair in a ponytail, seemed in worse shape. He lay still and stared in shock at the dark sky.

“No sign of the child?” Barzani said.

“Nothing,” his colleague Klas Lang said.

“And the woman?”

“No sign.”

Barzani was not sure if this was good news and he asked a few more questions. But no-one knew what had happened. The only certainty was that two automatic weapons, Barrett REC7s, had been found thirty or forty metres away, close to the jetty. They were assumed to belong to the men, but when asked how they had ended up there, the man with the pockmarked face spat out an incomprehensible answer.

Barzani and his colleagues spent the next fifteen minutes combing the terrain. All they could find were further signs of combat. More and more people began to arrive on the scene: ambulance crew, Detective Sergeant Modig, two or three crime scene technicians, a succession of regular policemen and the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, who was accompanied by a massive American with a crew cut who immediately commanded everyone’s respect. At 5.25 they were informed that a witness was waiting to be interviewed down by the seashore and parking area. The man wanted to be addressed as K.G. He was actually called Karl-Gustav Matzon. He had fairly recently bought a new-build on the other side of the water. According to Lang, he needed to be taken with a pinch of salt: “The old boy has a very vivid imagination.”

Modig and Holmberg were standing in the parking area, trying to make sense of what had happened. The picture so far was fragmented and they were hoping that the witness K.G. Matzon would bring a measure of clarity to the night.

But when they saw him coming towards them along the shoreline, that seemed less and less likely. K.G. Matzon was resplendent in a Tyrolean hat, green checked trousers and a red Canada Goose jacket and he was sporting an absurd twirly moustache. He looked as if he were trying to be funny.

“K.G. Matzon?” Modig said.

“The very same,” he said, and without any prompting – maybe he realized that his credibility needed a boost – he explained that he ran True Crimes, a publishing house which produced books on notable crimes.

“Excellent. But right now we’d like a factual account – not some sales pitch for a forthcoming book,” Modig said, to be on the safe side. Matzon said that, of course, he understood.

He was after all a “respectable person”. He had woken up at a ridiculous hour, he said, and lain there listening to “the silence and the calm”. But just before 4.30 he heard something which he immediately recognized as a pistol shot, so he quickly got dressed and went onto his terrace – which had a view of the beach, the rock promontory and the parking area where they were now standing.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing. It was eerily quiet. Then the air exploded. It sounded as if a war had broken out.”

“You heard more shots?”

“There were cracks of gunfire from the promontory on the other side of the inlet and I stared across, stunned, and then … did I mention I was a birdwatcher?”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Well, it’s made my eyesight very good, you see. I’ve got eagle eyes. I’m used to pinpointing tiny details far off, and I’m sure that’s why I noticed a small dot on the rock ledge up there, do you see it? The edge of it sort of cuts into the rock slope like a pocket.”

Modig looked up at the slope and nodded.

“At first I couldn’t tell what it was,” Matzon continued. “But then I realized it was a child – a boy, I think. He was sitting up there in a crouch and trembling, at least that’s how it seemed to me, and then suddenly … my God, I’ll never forget it.”

“What?”

“Someone came racing down from above, a woman, and she leaped into the air and landed so violently on the rock ledge that she all but fell off it, and after that they sat there together, she and the boy, and just waited, and waited for the inevitable, and then …”

“Yes?”

“Two men appeared holding assault rifles and shot and shot, and as I’m sure you can imagine, I just threw myself to the ground. I was scared I’d get hit. But I couldn’t help looking up at them all the same. You see, from where I was the boy and the girl were clearly visible. But they were invisible to the men standing at the top, at least for the moment. It was obvious to me that it was only a matter of time before they were discovered and there was no escape. As soon as they left the rock ledge the men would see them and kill them. It was a hopeless situation.”

“But we’ve found neither the boy nor the woman up there,” Modig said.

“That’s just it! The men got closer and closer – they only needed to lean forward to see the woman and the child. In the end they could probably have heard them breathing. But then …”

“Yes?’

“You’re not going to believe this. That man from the Rapid Response Unit definitely didn’t.”

“Well, go ahead and tell me, and we can worry later about whether it’s believable.”

“When the men stopped to listen, maybe they sensed they were very close, the woman leaped to her feet and shot them. Bang, bang! Then she rushed forward and threw their weapons away. It was like an action film, and after that she ran, or rather rolled, almost fell down the slope with the boy to a B.M.W. standing here in the parking area. Just before they got into the car I saw that the woman was holding something – it looked like a computer bag.”

“Did they drive away in the B.M.W.?”

“At a fearful speed. I have no idea where they went.”

“Of course not.”

“But that’s not all.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was another car there – a Range Rover, I think, black, a new model.”

“And what happened to that one?”

“I was busy ringing the emergency services, but just as I was about to hang up I saw two more people coming down from the wooden steps over there, a tall thin man and a woman. I didn’t get a good look at them from that distance. But I can still tell you two things about that woman.”

“Yes?”

“She was a twelve-pointer, and she was angry.”

“Twelve-pointer meaning beautiful?”

“Or at least glamorous, classy. You could see it a mile off. But boy was she furious. Just before they got into the Range Rover she slapped the man, and the weird thing is: he hardly reacted. He just nodded as if he thought he deserved it. Then he got behind the wheel and they were gone.”

Modig noted everything down, realizing that she had to get out a nationwide search bulletin for both the Range Rover and the B.M.W. without delay.

Gabriella Grane was drinking a cappuccino in her kitchen on Villagatan and thinking that she was holding it together, all things considered. But she was probably in shock.

Helena Kraft wanted to see her at 8.00 in the office at Säpo. Grane guessed that she wouldn’t just get the sack. There would be judicial consequences too, which would pretty much ruin her prospects of finding another job. At thirty-three, her career was over.

And that was by no means the worst of it. She had known that she was flouting the law and had taken a conscious risk. But she had done it because she believed it was the best way to protect Frans Balder’s son. Now, after the shoot-out at her summer place, no-one seemed to know where the boy was. He might be injured, or even dead. Grane was racked by the most devastating feelings of guilt: first the father and now the son.

She got up and looked at the clock. It was 7.15 and she needed to get going to give herself time to clean out her desk before the meeting with Kraft. She made up her mind to behave with dignity, to not make any excuses or beg to be allowed to stay. Her Blackphone rang, but she couldn’t be bothered to answer. Instead she put on her boots and her Prada coat and an extravagant red scarf. If she was going under, she might just as well go with a bit of panache. She stood in front of the hall mirror and touched up her make-up, wryly giving herself the victory sign, as Nixon had when he resigned. Then her Blackphone rang again and this time she answered reluctantly. It was Casales at the N.S.A.

“I’ve just heard,” she said.

Of course she had.

“How are you feeling?”

“What do you think?”

“Like the worst person in the whole world?”

“Pretty much.”

“Who’ll never get another job?”

“Spot on, Alona.”

“In that case, let me tell you, you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. You did the right thing.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“Doesn’t seem like the moment for jokes, sweetheart. You have a mole on your team.”

Gabriella took a deep breath. “Who is it?”

“Nielsen.”

Gabriella froze. “Do you have proof?”

“Oh yes, I’ll send it all over in a few minutes.”

“Why would Nielsen betray us?”

“I guess he didn’t see it as a betrayal.”

“What on earth did he see it as if not betrayal?”

“Collaborating with Big Brother maybe, doing his duty by the leading nation in the free world? What do I know?”

“So he gave you information.”

“He helped us to help ourselves, actually. He gave us information about your server and your encryption. It’s not as outrageous as it sounds. Let’s face it, we listen in on everything from the neighbours’ gossip to the prime minister’s telephone calls.”

“But this time the information was leaked a stage further.”

“In this case it seeped out like we were a funnel. I know, Gabriella, that you didn’t exactly stick to the rulebook. But I’m absolutely convinced that you were in the right, and I’ll make sure that your superiors get to hear it. You could see that there was something rotten in your organization, so you couldn’t act within it, yet you were determined not to shirk your responsibility.”

“But it went wrong.”

“Sometimes things go wrong, no matter how careful you are.”

“Thanks, Alona, it’s nice of you to say so. But if anything has happened to August Balder, I will never forgive myself.”

“Gabriella, the boy is O.K. He’s cruising around in a car somewhere with Miss Salander, in case someone’s still chasing them.”

Grane could not take it in. “What do you mean?”

“That he’s unhurt, babe, and that thanks to him his father’s murderer has been caught and identified.”

“You’re saying August is alive?”

“That’s right.”

“How do you know?”

“Let’s just say I have a very well-placed source.”

“Alona …”

“Yes?”

“If what you say is true, you’ve given me back my life.”

After hanging up, Grane rang Kraft and insisted that Mårten Nielsen be present at their meeting. Reluctantly, Kraft agreed.

It was 7.30 in the morning when Needham and Blomkvist made their way down the steps from Grane’s summer house to the Audi in the parking area by the beach. Snow lay over the landscape and neither of them said a word. At 5.30 Blomkvist had got a text message from Salander, as brisk and to the point as ever.

Again Salander had not mentioned her own state of health. But it was an incredible relief to hear about the boy. Afterwards Blomkvist had been questioned at length by Modig and Holmberg and he told them every detail of what he and the magazine had been doing over the past few days. They were not friendly or well disposed towards him, yet he got the feeling that somehow they understood. Now, an hour later, he was walking past the jetty. Up the slope a deer scampered into the forest. Blomkvist settled into the driving seat and waited for Needham, who came loping along in his wake. The American’s back was giving him trouble.