The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) (39 page)

“I actually agree with that noisy bastard out there. You’re not quite right in the head,” Jamila said.

“Maybe so,” Salander said.

“That wound looks nasty.”

“It’s healing.”

“But you needed to box?”

“Apparently.”

“Shall we go back to my place?”

Salander did not answer. Her mobile was buzzing again in her black bag. Three text messages with the same content from a withheld number. As she read them she balled up her fists and looked lethal. Jamila felt that it might be better to have sex with Salander another day instead.

Blomkvist had woken at 6.00 with some great ideas for the article, and on his way to the office the draft came together in his mind with no effort at all. He worked in deep concentration at the magazine and barely noticed what was going on around him, although sometimes he surfaced with thoughts of Zander.

He refused to give up hope, but he feared that Zander had given his life for the story, and he did what he could to honour his colleague with every sentence he wrote. On one level he intended the report to be a murder story about Frans and August Balder – an account of an eight-year-old autistic boy who sees his father shot, and who despite his disability finds a way of striking back. But on another level Blomkvist wanted it to be an instructive narrative about a new world of surveillance and espionage, where the boundaries between the legal and the criminal have been erased. The words came pouring out, but still it was not without its difficulties.

Through an old police contact he had got hold of the paperwork on the unsolved murder of Kajsa Falk, the girlfriend of one of the leading figures in Svavelsjö M.C. The killer had never been identified and none of the people questioned during the investigation had been willing to contribute anything of value, but Blomkvist nevertheless gathered that a violent rift had torn apart the motorcycle club and that there was an insidious terror among the gang members of a “Lady Zala”, as one of the witnesses put it.

Despite considerable efforts, the police had not managed to discover who or what the name referred to. But there was not the slightest doubt in Blomkvist’s mind that “Lady Zala” was Camilla, and that she was behind a whole series of other crimes, both in Sweden and abroad. But it was not easy to unearth any evidence, and that exasperated him. For the time being he referred to her in the article by her codename, Thanos.

Yet the biggest challenge was not Camilla or her shadowy connections to the Russian Duma. What bothered Blomkvist most was that he knew Needham would never have come all the way to Sweden and leaked top-secret information if he were not bent on hiding something even bigger. Needham was no fool, and he in turn knew that Blomkvist was not stupid either. He had therefore not tried to make any part of his account too pretty.

On the contrary, he painted a fairly dreadful picture of the N.S.A. And yet … a closer inspection of the information told Blomkvist that, all in all, Needham was describing an intelligence agency which both functioned well and behaved reasonably decently, if you ignored the revolting bunch of criminals in the department known as Protection of Strategic Technologies – the self-same department, as it happens, which had prevented Needham from nailing his hacker.

The American must have wanted to do serious harm to a few specific colleagues, but rather than sink the whole of his organization, he preferred to give it a softer landing in an already inevitable crash. So Blomkvist was not especially surprised or angry when Berger appeared behind him and with a worried expression handed him a T.T. telegram.

“Does this scupper our story?” she said.

The telegram read:

Two senior executives at the N.S.A., Jacob Barclay and Brian Abbot, have been arrested on suspicion of serious financial misconduct and are on indefinite leave awaiting trial.

“This is a blot on the reputation of our organization and we have spared no effort in tackling the issues and holding those guilty to account. Anyone working for the N.S.A. must have the highest ethical standards and we undertake to be as transparent during the judicial process as we can, while remaining sensitive to our national security interests,” N.S.A. chief Admiral Charles O’Connor has told A.P.

The telegram did not contain very much apart from the long quote; it said nothing about Balder’s murder and nothing that could be linked to the events in Stockholm. But Blomkvist understood what Berger meant. Now that the news was out, the
Washington Post
and the
New York Times
and a whole pack of serious American journalists would descend on the story, and it would be impossible to anticipate what they might dig up.

“Not good,” he said calmly. “But not a surprise.”

“Really?”

“It’s part of the same strategy that led the N.S.A. to seek me out: damage limitation. They want to take back the initiative.”

“How do you mean?”

“There’s a reason why they leaked this to me. I could tell right away that there was something odd about it. Why did Needham insist on coming to talk to me here in Stockholm, and at 5.00 in the morning?”

“So you think that what he’s doing is sanctioned higher up?”

“I suspected it, but at first I didn’t get what he was doing. I just felt that something was wrong. Then I talked to Salander.”

“And that clarified things?”

“I realized that Needham knew exactly what she’d dug up during her hacker attack, and he had every reason to fear that I would learn all about it. He wanted to limit the damage.”

“Even so, he hardly presented you with a rosy picture.”

“He knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with anything too pretty. I suspect he gave me just enough to keep me happy and let me have my scoop, and to prevent me from digging any deeper.”

“He’s in for a disappointment then.”

“Let’s at least hope so. But I can’t see how to break through. The N.S.A. is a closed door.”

“Even for an old bloodhound like Mikael Blomkvist?”

“Even for him.”

25.xi

The text message had said

Salander could not work out if it had been sent three times in error or if it was an absurd attempt to be over-explicit. It made no difference now anyway.

The message was evidently from Camilla, but it added nothing to what Salander already knew. The events on Ingarö had only deepened the ancient hatred – she was certain Camilla would come after her again, having got so close.

It was not the wording of the texts that had upset Salander so much as the thoughts it had brought to mind, the memory of what she had seen on the steep rock slope in the early morning light when she and August had crouched on the narrow ledge in falling snow, gunfire rattling above them. August had not been wearing a jacket or shoes and was shivering violently as the seconds went by and Salander realized how desperately compromised their situation was. She had a child to take care of and a pathetic pistol for a weapon, while the bastards up there had assault rifles. She had to take them by surprise, otherwise she and August would be slaughtered like lambs. She listened to the men’s footsteps and the direction they were shooting in, even their breathing and the rustle of their clothes.

But the strange thing was, when she finally saw her chance, she hesitated. Crucial moments went by as she broke a small twig into pieces on the rock ledge in front of them. Only then did she spring to her feet right in front of the men and, taking advantage of that brief millisecond of surprise, she fired right away, two, three times. From experience she knew that moments like these burned an indelible impression on your mind, as if not only your body and muscles are sharpened, but also your perception.

Every detail shone with a strange precision and she saw each ripple in the landscape in front of her, as if through a camera zoom. She noted the surprise and fear in the men’s eyes, the wrinkles and irregularities in their faces and clothes, and the weapons which they were waving and firing off at random, narrowly missing their targets.

But her strongest impression did not come from any of that. It came from a silhouette further up the slope which she caught out of the corner of her eye, not menacing in itself, but it made more of an impact on her than the men she had shot. The silhouette was that of her sister. Salander would have recognized her a kilometre away, even though they had not seen each other for years. The air itself was poisoned by her presence and afterwards Salander wondered if she should have shot her too.

Camilla stood there a moment too long. It was careless of her to be out on the rock slope in the first place, but presumably she could not resist the temptation of seeing her sister being executed. Salander recalled how she half squeezed the trigger and felt a holy rage beating in her chest. Yet she hesitated for a split second, and that was enough. Camilla threw herself behind a rock and a scrawny figure appeared on the terrace and started shooting. Salander jumped back onto the ledge and tumbled down the slope with August.

Now, walking away from the boxing club, thinking back to it all, Salander’s body tightened in readiness for a new battle. It struck her that perhaps she should not go home at all, but leave the country for a while. But something else drove her back to her desk; what she had seen in her mind’s eye in the shower, before reading Camilla’s texts, and which was now occupying her thoughts more and more. August’s equation:

From a mathematical point of view, there was nothing unique or extraordinary about it. But what was so remarkable was that August had started with the random number she had given him at Ingarö and taken that further to develop a considerably better elliptic curve than the one she herself had made. When the boy had not wanted to go to sleep, she had left it on the bedside table. She had not got any answer then, nor even the slightest reaction, and she had gone to bed convinced that August understood nothing about mathematical abstractions, that he was only a kind of human calculator of prime-number factorizations.

But, my God … she had been wrong. August had stayed up in the night not just drawing; he had also perfected her own mathematics. She did not even take off her boots or leather jacket, she just stomped into her apartment and opened the encrypted N.S.A. file along with her program for the elliptic curves.

Then she rang Hanna Balder.

Hanna had scarcely slept because she had not brought any of her pills with her. Yet the hotel and its surroundings still cheered her. The breathtaking mountain scenery reminded her of how cramped her own existence had become. Slowly she began to unwind, and even the deep-seated fear in her body was beginning to let go. But that could have been wishful thinking. She also felt slightly at sea in such extravagant surroundings.

There had been a time when she would sail into rooms like these with perfect self-assurance:
Look at me, here I come
. Now she was timid and trembling and had difficulty eating anything even though the breakfast was lavish. August sat beside her, compulsively writing out his series of numbers, and he was not eating either, but he drank unbelievable volumes of freshly pressed orange juice.

Her new mobile rang, startling her. But it had to be the woman who had sent them here. Nobody else had the number, so far as she knew, and no doubt she just wanted to know if they had arrived safely. So Hanna answered cheerfully and launched into an effusive description of how wonderful everything at the hotel was. She was brusquely interrupted:

“Where are you?”

“We’re having breakfast.”

“In that case stop now and go up to your room. August and I have work to do.”

“Work?”

“I’m going to send over some equations I want him to take a look at. Is that clear?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just show them to August, and then call me and tell me what he’s written.”

“O.K.,” Hanna said, nonplussed.

She grabbed a couple of croissants and a cinnamon bun and walked with August to the lifts.

It was only at the outset that August helped her. But it was enough. Later she would see her mistakes more clearly and make new improvements to her program. Deep in concentration she worked on for hour after hour, until the sky darkened outside and the snow began to fall again. Then suddenly – in one of those moments she would remember for ever – something strange happened to the file. It fell apart. A shock ran through her. She punched the air.

She had found the secret keys and cracked the document, and for a little while she was so overcome by this that she hardly managed to read. Then she began to examine the contents, and her amazement grew with every passing moment. Could this even be possible? It was more explosive than anything she had imagined, and the reason it had all been written down could only have been that someone believed the R.S.A. algorithm was impenetrable. But here it was, black on white, all that filth and dirt. The text was full of internal jargon and strange abbreviations and cryptic references, but that was not a problem for Salander since she was familiar with the subject. She had got through about four-fifths of the text when the doorbell rang.

She chose to ignore it, probably only the postman. But then she remembered Camilla’s text message and checked the camera on the landing on her computer. She stiffened.

It was not Camilla but her other bugbear, the one she had almost forgotten with everything else that was going on. Ed the fucking Ned. He looked nothing like his pictures online, but he was unmistakable all the same. He looked grumpy and determined, and Salander’s brain started ticking. How had he managed to track her down? What should she do? The best she could come up with was to send the N.S.A. file off to Blomkvist on their P.G.P. link.

Then she shut down her computer and hauled herself to her feet to open the door.

What had happened to Bublanski? Sonja Modig was at a loss to understand it. The pained expression he had been wearing in recent weeks had vanished, as if blown away. Now he smiled and hummed to himself. It’s true that there was plenty to be pleased about. The murderer had been caught. August Balder had survived despite two attempts on his life, and the details of Frans Balder’s conflict and connection with the research company Solifon were becoming clearer.

But many questions remained, and the Bublanski she knew was not one to rejoice without good reason. He was more inclined to self-doubt, even in moments of triumph. She could not imagine what had got into him. He walked around the corridors beaming. Even now, as he sat in his office reading the dull report on the questioning of Zigmund Eckerwald by the San Francisco police, there was a smile on his lips.

“Sonja, my dear. There you are!”

She decided not to comment on the unwonted enthusiasm of his greeting and went straight to the point.

“Jan Holtser is dead.”

“Oh no.”

“And with him went our last hope of learning more about the Spiders.”

“So you think he was about to open up?”

“There was a chance, at least.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He broke down completely when his daughter showed up.”

“I didn’t know. What happened?”

“He has a daughter called Olga,” Modig said. “She came from Helsinki when she heard that her father had been injured. But when I talked to her and she heard that he had tried to kill a child, she went berserk.”

“In what way?”

“She stormed in to him and said something incredibly aggressive in Russian.”

“Could you understand what she was saying?”

“Something like he could die alone and she hated him.”

“So she laid into him.”

“Yes, and afterwards she told me that she would do everything in her power to help us with the investigation.”

“And how did Holtser react?”

“That’s what I was saying. For a moment I thought we had him. He was totally destroyed, had tears in his eyes. I’m not really big on that Catholic teaching which says that our moral worth is determined just before we die. But it was almost touching to see. This man who had done so much evil was crushed.”

“My rabbi—”

“Please, Jan, don’t start with your rabbi now. Let me go on. Holtser said what a terrible person he had been, so I told him that he should as a Christian take the opportunity to confess, and tell us who he was working for, and at that moment I’m convinced he came close. He hesitated and his eyes flitted from side to side. But instead of confessing he began to talk about Stalin.”

“Stalin?”

“About how Stalin didn’t punish only the guilty but also their children and grandchildren and the entire family. I think he was trying to say that his boss was the same.”

“So he was worried about his daughter.”

“However much she may have hated him, he was. I tried to tell him that we could get the girl onto a witness protection programme, but Holtser had started to drift away. He fell unconscious and died an hour later.”

“Anything else?”

“Only that someone we’re beginning to think may be a superintelligence has vanished and that we still have no trace of Andrei Zander.”

“I know, I know.”

“We’ve at least made progress on one front,” Modig said. “You remember the man identified by Amanda on August’s drawing of the traffic light?”

“The former actor?”

“That’s right, he’s called Roger Winter. Amanda interviewed him for background information, to find out whether there was a relationship between him and the boy or Balder, and I don’t think she expected to get much out of it. But Winter seemed to be badly shaken, and before Amanda had even begun to put pressure on him he confessed to a whole catalogue of sins.”

“Really?”

“And we’re not talking innocent stories. You know, Westman and Winter have been friends since they were young men at Revolutionsteatern and they used to get together to drink in the afternoons at the apartment in Torsgatan when Hanna was out. August would sit in the next room doing his puzzles, and neither of the men paid him much attention. But on one of these occasions the boy had been given a thick maths book by his mother – it was clearly way above his level, but he still leafed through it frantically, making excited noises. Lasse became irritated and grabbed the book from the boy and threw it in the bin. It seems August went completely crazy. He had some sort of fit, and Lasse kicked him several times.”

“That’s appalling.”

“That was just the beginning. After that August became very odd, Roger said. The boy took to glaring at them with this weird look, and one day Roger found that his jeans jacket had been cut into tiny pieces, and another day someone had emptied out all the beer in the fridge and smashed all the bottles of spirits. It turned into some kind of trench warfare, and I suspect that Roger and Lasse in their alcoholic delirium began to imagine all sorts of strange things about the boy, and even became scared of him. The psychological aspect of this isn’t easy to understand. Roger said it made him feel like shit, and he never talked about it with Lasse afterwards. He didn’t want to beat the boy. But he couldn’t stop himself. It was as if he got his own childhood back, he said.”