The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (24 page)

“Have you got any good colleagues?”

Morander laughed again.

“Oh yes, but you’re going to have to decide for yourself which ones you can get along with. Some of the reporters out there are seriously good.”

“How about management?”

“Magnus Borgsjö is the CEO. He was the one who recruited you. He’s charming. A bit old school and yet at the same time a bit of a reformer, but he’s above all the one who makes the decisions. Some of the board members, including several from the family which owns the paper, mostly seem to sit and kill time, while others flutter around, professional board-member types.”

“You don’t seem to be exactly enamoured of your board.”

“There’s a division of labour. We put out the paper. They take care of the
finances. They’re not supposed to interfere with the content, but situations do crop up. To be honest, Erika, between the two of us, this is going to be tough.”

“Why’s that?”

“Circulation has dropped by nearly 150,000 copies since the glory days of the sixties, and there may soon come a time when
SMP
is no longer profitable. We’ve reorganized, cut more than 180 jobs since 1980. We went over to tabloid format—which we should have done twenty years sooner.
SMP
is still one of the big papers, but it wouldn’t take much for us to be regarded as a second-class paper. If it hasn’t already happened.”

“Why did they pick me, then?” Berger said.

“Because the median age of our readers is fifty-plus, and the growth in readers in their twenties is almost zero. The paper has to be rejuvenated. And the reasoning among the board was to bring in the most improbable editor in chief they could think of.”

“A woman?”

“Not just any woman.
The
woman who crushed Wennerström’s empire, who is considered the queen of investigative journalism, and who has a reputation for being the toughest. Picture it. It’s irresistible. If
you
can’t rejuvenate this paper, nobody can.
SMP
isn’t just hiring Erika Berger, we’re hiring the whole mystique that goes with your name.”

When Blomkvist left Café Copacabana, next to the Kvarter cinema in Hornstull, it was just past 2:00 p.m. He put on his dark glasses and turned up Bergsundsstrand on his way to the tunnelbana. He noticed the grey Volvo parked at the corner right away. He passed it without slowing down. Same registration, and the car was empty.

It was the seventh time he had seen the car in four days. He had no idea how long it had been in his neighbourhood. It was pure chance that he had noticed it at all. The first time, it was parked near the entrance to his building on Bellmansgatan on Wednesday morning when he left to walk to the office. He happened to read the registration number, which began with KAB, and he paid attention because those were the initials of Zalachenko’s holding company, Karl Axel Bodin Inc. He would not have thought any more about it except that he spotted the car again a few hours later when he was having lunch with Cortez and Eriksson at Medborgarplatsen. That time the Volvo was parked on a side street near the
Millennium
offices.

He wondered whether he was becoming paranoid, but when he visited Palmgren the same afternoon at the rehabilitation home in Ersta, the car
was in the visitors’ parking lot. That could not have been chance. Blomkvist began to keep an eye on everything around him. And when he saw the car again the next morning he was not surprised.

Not once had he seen its driver.

A call to the national vehicle registry revealed that the car belonged to a Göran Mårtensson of Vittangigatan in Vällingby. An hour’s research turned up the information that Mårtensson held the title of business consultant and owned a private company whose address was a P.O. box on Fleminggatan in Kungsholmen. Mårtensson’s CV was an interesting one. In 1983, at eighteen, he had done his military service with the coast guard, and then enrolled in the army. By 1989 he had advanced to lieutenant, and then he switched to study at the police academy in Solna. Between 1991 and 1996 he worked for the Stockholm police. In 1997 he was no longer on the official roster of the external service, and in 1999 he had registered his own company.

So—Säpo
.

An industrious investigative journalist could get paranoid on less than this. Blomkvist concluded that he was under surveillance, but it was being carried out so clumsily that he could hardly have helped but notice.

Or was it clumsy? The only reason he first noticed the car was the registration number, which just happened to mean something to him. But for the KAB, he would not have given the car a second glance.

On Friday KAB was conspicuous by its absence. Blomkvist could not be absolutely sure, but he thought he had been tailed by a red Audi that day. He had not managed to catch the registration number. On Friday the Volvo was back.

Exactly twenty seconds after Blomkvist left Café Copacabana, Malm raised his Nikon in the shadows of Café Rosso’s awning across the street and took a series of twelve photographs of the two men who followed Blomkvist out of the café and past the Kvarter cinema.

One of the men looked to be in his late thirties or early forties and had blond hair. The other seemed a bit older, with thinning reddish-blond hair and sunglasses. Both were dressed in jeans and leather jackets.

They parted company at the grey Volvo. The older man got in, and the younger one followed Blomkvist towards the Hornstull tunnelbana station.

Malm lowered the camera. Blomkvist had given him no good reason for insisting that he patrol the neighbourhood near the Copacabana on Sunday afternoon looking for a grey Volvo with a registration beginning KAB.
Blomkvist told him to position himself where he could photograph whoever got into the car, probably just after 3:00. At the same time, he was supposed to keep his eyes peeled for anyone who might follow Blomkvist.

It sounded like the prelude to a typical Blomkvist adventure. Malm was never quite sure whether Blomkvist was paranoid by nature or if he had paranormal gifts. Since the events in Gosseberga his colleague had certainly become withdrawn and hard to communicate with. Nothing unusual about this. But when Blomkvist was working on a complicated story—Malm had observed the same obsessive and secretive behaviour in the weeks before the Wennerström story broke—it became more pronounced.

On the other hand, Malm could see for himself that Blomkvist was indeed being tailed. He wondered vaguely what new nightmare was in the works. Whatever it was, it would soak up all of
Millennium
’s time, energy, and resources. Malm didn’t think it was a great idea for Blomkvist to set off on some wild scheme just when the magazine’s editor in chief had deserted to the Big Daily, and now
Millennium
’s laboriously reconstructed stability was suddenly hanging in the balance once again.

But Malm had not participated in any parade—apart from Gay Pride—in at least ten years. He had nothing better to do on this May Day Sunday than humour his wayward publisher. He sauntered after the man tailing Blomkvist even though he had not been instructed to do so, but he lost sight of him on Långholmsgatan.

One of the first things Blomkvist did when he realized that his mobile was bugged was to send Cortez out to buy some used handsets. Cortez bought a job lot of Ericsson T10s for a song. Blomkvist then opened some anonymous cash-card accounts on Comviq and distributed the mobiles to Eriksson, Cortez, Giannini, Malm, and Armansky, keeping one for himself. They were to be used only for conversations that absolutely must not be overheard. Day-to-day stuff they could and should do on their own mobiles. Which meant that they all had to carry two mobiles with them.

Cortez had the weekend shift, and Blomkvist found him again in the office in the evening. Since the murder of Zalachenko, Blomkvist had devised a 24/7 roster, so that
Millennium
’s office was always staffed and someone slept there every night. The roster included himself, Cortez, Eriksson, and Malm. Lotta Karim was notoriously afraid of the dark and would never for the life of her have agreed to be by herself overnight at the office. Nilsson was not afraid of the dark, but she worked so furiously on her projects that she was encouraged to go home when the day was done.
Magnusson was getting on in years and as advertising manager had nothing to do with the editorial side. He was also about to go on vacation.

“Anything new?”

“Nothing special,” Cortez said. “Today is all about May 1, naturally enough.”

“I’m going to be here for a couple of hours,” Blomkvist told him. “Take a break and come back around 9:00.”

After Cortez left, Blomkvist got out his anonymous mobile and called Daniel Olsson, a freelance journalist in Göteborg. Over the years,
Millennium
had published several of his articles, and Blomkvist had great faith in his ability to gather background material.

“Hi, Daniel. Mikael Blomkvist here. Can you talk?”

“Sure.”

“I need someone for a research job. You can bill us for five days, and you don’t have to produce an article at the end of it. Well, you can write an article on the subject if you want and we’ll publish it, but it’s the research we’re after.”

“Fine. Tell me.”

“It’s sensitive. You can’t discuss this with anyone except me, and you can communicate with me only via Hotmail. You must not even mention that you’re doing research for
Millennium.”

“This sounds like fun. What are you looking for?”

“I want you to do a workplace report on Sahlgrenska hospital. We’re calling the report ‘ER,’ and it’s to look at the differences between reality and the TV series. I want you to go to the hospital and observe the work in the emergency ward and the intensive care unit for a couple of days. Talk with doctors, nurses, and cleaners—everybody who works there, in fact. What are their working conditions like? What do they actually
do?
That sort of stuff. Photographs too, of course.”

“Intensive care?” Olsson said.

“Exactly. I want you to focus on the follow-up care given to severely injured patients in corridor 11C. I want to know the whole layout of the corridor, who works there, what they look like, and what sort of background they have.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, a certain Lisbeth Salander is a patient on 11C.”

Olsson was not born yesterday.

“How interesting,” Blomkvist said. “Find out which room she’s in, who’s in the neighbouring rooms, and what the routines are in that section.”

“I have a feeling that this story is going to be about something altogether different,” Olsson said.

“As I said, all I want is the research you come up with.”

They exchanged Hotmail addresses.

Salander was lying on her back on the floor when Nurse Marianne came in.

“Hmm,” she said, thereby indicating her doubts about the wisdom of this style of conduct in the intensive care unit. But it was, she accepted, her patient’s only exercise space.

Salander was sweating. She had spent thirty minutes trying to do arm lifts, stretches, and sit-ups on the recommendation of her physical therapist. She had a long list of the movements she was to perform each day to strengthen the muscles in her shoulder and hip in the wake of her operation three weeks earlier. She was breathing hard and felt wretchedly out of shape. She tired easily, and her left shoulder was tight and hurt at the very least effort. But she was on the path to recovery. The headaches that had tormented her after surgery had subsided and came back only sporadically.

She realized that she was sufficiently recovered now that she could have walked out of the hospital, or at any rate hobbled out, if that had been possible, but it was not. First of all, the doctors had not yet declared her fit, and second, the door to her room was always locked and guarded by a fucking hit man from Securitas, who sat on his chair in the corridor.

She was healthy enough to be moved to a normal rehabilitation ward, but after going back and forth about this, the police and hospital administration had agreed that Salander should remain in room 18 for the time being. The room was easier to guard, there was round-the-clock staff close by, and the room was at the end of an L-shaped corridor. And in corridor 11C the staff were security-conscious after the killing of Zalachenko; they were familiar with her situation. Better not to move her to a new ward with new routines.

Her stay at Sahlgrenska was in any case going to come to an end in a few more weeks. As soon as the doctors discharged her, she would be transferred to Kronoberg prison in Stockholm to await trial. And the person who would decide when it was time for that was Dr. Jonasson.

It was ten days after the shooting in Gosseberga before Dr. Jonasson gave permission for the police to conduct their first real interview, which Giannini viewed as being to Salander’s advantage. Unfortunately, Dr. Jonasson had made it difficult even for Giannini to have access to her client, and that was annoying.

After the tumult of Zalachenko’s murder and Gullberg’s attempted suicide, Jonasson had done an evaluation of Salander’s condition. He took
into account that Salander must be under a great deal of stress as the suspect for three murders plus the near fatal assault on her late father. Jonasson had no idea whether she was guilty or innocent, and as a doctor he was not the least bit interested in the answer to that question. He simply concluded that Salander was suffering from stress, that she had been shot three times, and that one bullet had entered her brain and almost killed her. She had a fever that would not abate, and she had severe headaches.

He had played it safe. Murder suspect or not, she was his patient, and his job was to make sure she got well. So he filled out a “no visitors” form that had no connection whatsoever to the one that was set in place by the prosecutor. He prescribed various medications and complete bedrest.

But Jonasson also realized that isolation was an inhumane way of punishing people; in fact, it bordered on torture. No-one felt good when they were separated from all their friends, so he decided that Salander’s lawyer should serve as a proxy friend. He had a serious talk with Giannini and explained that she could have access to Salander for one hour a day. During this hour she could talk with her or just sit quietly and keep her company, but their conversations should not deal with Salander’s problems or impending legal battles.