The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

"Why not?"



"Could you come here this afternoon?"



"What for?"



"I need help. If you want to come back to being editor-in-chief here, you could start tomorrow morning."



"Malin, you're the editor-in-chief. Anything else is out of the question."



"Then you could start as assistant editor," Eriksson laughed.



"Are you serious?"



"Oh, Erika, I miss you so much that I'm ready to die. One reason I took the job here was so that I'd have a chance to work with you. And now you're somewhere else."



Berger said nothing for a minute. She had not even thought about the possibility of making a comeback at Millennium.



"Do you think I'd really be welcome?" she said hesitantly.



"What do you think? I reckon we'd begin with a huge celebration which I would arrange myself. And you'd be back just in time for us to publish you-know-what."



Berger checked the clock on her desk. 10.55. In a couple of hours her whole world had been turned upside down. She realized what a longing she had to walk up the stairs at Millennium again.



"I have a few things to take care of here over the next few hours. Is it O.K. if I pop in at around 4.00?"



Linder looked Armansky directly in the eye as she told him exactly what had happened during the night. The only thing she left out was her sudden intuition that the hacking of Fredriksson's computer had something to do with Salander. She kept that to herself for two reasons. First, she thought it sounded too implausible. Second, she knew that Armansky was somehow up to his neck in the Salander affair along with Blomkvist.



Armansky listened intently. When Linder finished her account, he said: "Beckman called about an hour ago."



"Oh?"



"He and Berger are coming in later this week to sign a contract. He wants to thank us for what Milton has done and above all for what you have done."



"I see. It's nice to have a satisfied client."



"He also wants to order a safe for the house. We'll install it and finish up the alarm package before this weekend."



"That's good."



"He says he wants us to invoice him for your work over the weekend. That'll make it quite a sizable bill we'll be sending them." Armansky sighed. "Susanne, you do know that Fredriksson could go to the police and get you into very deep water on a number of counts."



She nodded.



"Mind you, he'd end up in prison so fast it would make his head spin, but he might think it was worth it."



"I doubt he has the balls to go to the police."



"You may be right, but what you did far exceeded instructions."



"I know."



"So how do you think I should react?"



"Only you can decide that."



"How did you think I would to react?"



"What I think has nothing to do with it. You could always sack me."



"Hardly. I can't afford to lose a professional of your calibre."



"Thanks."



"But if you do anything like this again, I'm going to get very angry."



Linder nodded.



"What did you do with the hard drive?"



"It's destroyed. I put it in a vice this morning and crushed it."



"Then we can forget about all this."



Berger spent the rest of the morning calling the board members of S.M.P. She reached the deputy chairman at his summer house near Vaxholm and persuaded him to drive to the city as quickly as he could. A rather makeshift board assembled over lunch. Berger began by explaining how the Cortez folder had come to her, and what consequences it had already had.



When she finished it was proposed, as she had anticipated, that they try to find another solution. Berger told them that S.M.P. was going to run the story the next day. She also told them that this would be her last day of work and that her decision was final.



She got the board to approve two decisions and enter them in the minutes. Magnus Borgsjo would be asked to vacate his position as chairman, effective immediately, and Anders Holm would be appointed acting editor-in-chief. Then she excused herself and left the board members to discuss the situation among themselves.



At 2.00 she went down to the personnel department and had a contract drawn up. Then she went to speak to Sebastian Strandlund, the culture editor, and the reporter Eva Karlsson.



"As far as I can tell, you consider Eva to be a talented reporter."



"That's true," said Strandlund.



"And in your budget requests over the past two years you've asked that your staff be increased by at least two."



"Correct."



"Eva, in view of the email to which you were subjected, there might be ugly rumours if I were to hire you full-time. But are you still interested?"



"Of course."



"In that case my last act here at S.M.P. will be to sign this employment contract."



"Your last act?"



"It's a long story. I'm leaving today. Could you two be so kind as to keep quiet about it for an hour or so?"



"What..."



"There'll be a memo coming around soon."



Berger signed the contract and pushed it across the desk towards Karlsson.



"Good luck," she said, smiling.



"The older man who participated in the meeting with Ekstrom on Saturday is Georg Nystrom, a police superintendent," Figuerola said as she put the surveillance photographs from Modig's mobile on Edklinth's desk.



"Superintendent," Edklinth muttered.



"Stefan identified him last night. He went to the apartment on Artillerigatan."



"What do we know about him?"



"He comes from the regular police and has worked for S.I.S. since 1983. Since 1996 he's been serving as an investigator with his own area of responsibility. He does internal checks and examines cases that S.I.S. has completed."



"O.K."



"Since Saturday morning six persons of interest have been to the building. Besides Sandberg and Nystrom, Clinton is definitely operating from there. This morning he was taken by ambulance to have dialysis."



"Who are the other three?"



"A man named Otto Hallberg. He was in S.I.S. in the '80s but he's actually connected to the Defence General Staff. He works for the navy and the military intelligence service."



"I see. Why am I not surprised?"



Figuerola laid down one more photograph. "This man we haven't identified yet. He went to lunch with Hallberg. We'll have to see if we can get a better picture when he goes home tonight. But the most interesting one is this man." She laid another photograph on the desk.



"I recognize him," Edklinth said.



"His name is Wadensjoo."



"Precisely. He worked on the terrorist detail around fifteen years ago. A desk man. He was one of the candidates for the post of top boss here at the Firm. I don't know what became of him."



"He resigned in 1991. Guess who he had lunch with an hour or so ago."



She put her last photograph on the desk.



"Chief of Secretariat Shenke and Chief of Budget Gustav Atterbom. I want to have surveillance on these gentlemen around the clock. I want to know exactly who they meet."



"That's not practical," Edklinth said. "I have only four men available."



Edklinth pinched his lower lip as he thought. Then he looked up at Figuerola.



"We need more people," he said. "Do you think you could reach Inspector Bublanski discreetly and ask him if he might like to have dinner with me today? Around 7.00, say?"



Edklinth then reached for his telephone and dialled a number from memory.



"Hello, Armansky. It's Edklinth. Might I reciprocate for that wonderful dinner? No, I insist. Shall we say 7.00?"



Salander had spent the night in Kronoberg prison in a two-by-four-metre cell. The furnishings were pretty basic, but she had fallen asleep within minutes of the key being turned in the lock. Early on Monday morning she was up and obediently doing the stretching exercises prescribed for her by the physio at Sahlgrenska. Breakfast was then brought to her, and she sat on her cot and stared into space.



At 9.30 she was led to an interrogation cell at the end of the corridor. The guard was a short, bald, old man with a round face and hornrimmed glasses. He was polite and cheerful.



Giannini greeted her affectionately. Salander ignored Faste. She was meeting Prosecutor Ekstrom for the first time, and she spent the next half hour sitting on a chair staring stonily at a spot on the wall just above Ekstrom's head. She said nothing and she did not move a muscle.



At 10.00 Ekstrom broke off the fruitless interrogation. He was annoyed not to be able to get the slightest response out of her. For the first time he felt uncertain as he observed the thin, doll-like young woman. How was it possible that she could have beaten up those two thugs Lundin and Nieminen in Stallarholmen? Would the court really believe that story, even if he did have convincing evidence?



Salander was brought a simple lunch at noon and spent the next hour solving equations in her head. She focused on an area of spherical astronomy from a book she had read two years earlier.



At 2.30 she was led back to the interrogation cell. This time her guard was a young woman. Salander sat on a chair in the empty cell and pondered a particularly intricate equation.



After ten minutes the door opened.



"Hello, Lisbeth." A friendly tone. It was Teleborian.



He smiled at her, and she froze. The components of the equation she had constructed in the air before her came tumbling to the ground. She could hear the numbers and mathematical symbols bouncing and clattering as if they had physical form.



Teleborian stood still for a minute and looked at her before he sat down on the other side of the table. She continued to stare at the same spot on the wall.



After a while she met his eyes.



"I'm sorry that you've ended up in this situation," Teleborian said. "I'm going to try to help you in every way I can. I hope we can establish some level of mutual trust."



Salander examined every inch of him. The dishevelled hair. The beard. The little gap between his front teeth. The thin lips. The brand-new brown jacket. The shirt open at the neck. She listened to his smooth and treacherously friendly voice.



"I also hope that I can be of more help to you than the last time we met."



He placed a small notebook and pen on the table. Salander lowered her eyes and looked at the pen. It was a pointed, silver-coloured tube.



Risk assessment.



She suppressed an impulse to reach out and grab the pen.



Her eyes sought the little finger of his left hand. She saw a faint white mark where fifteen years earlier she had sunk in her teeth and locked her jaws so hard that she almost bit his finger off. It had taken three guards to hold her down and prise open her jaws.



I was a scared little girl barely into my teens then. Now I'm a grown woman. I can kill you whenever I want.



Again she fixed her eyes on the spot on the wall, and gathered up the scattered numbers and symbols and began to reassemble the equation.



Teleborian studied Salander with a neutral expression. He had not become an internationally respected psychiatrist for nothing. He had a gift for reading emotions and moods. He could sense a cold shadow passing through the room, and interpreted this as a sign that the patient felt fear and shame beneath her imperturbable exterior. He assumed that she was reacting to his presence, and was pleased that her attitude towards him had not changed over the years. She's going to hang herself in the district court.



Berger's final act at S.M.P. was to write a memo to the staff. To begin with her mood was angry, and she filled two pages explaining why she was resigning, including her opinion of various colleagues. Then she deleted the whole text and started again in a calmer tone.



She did not refer to Fredriksson. If she had done, all interest would have focused on him, and her real reasons would be drowned out by the sensation a case of sexual harassment would inevitably cause.



She gave two reasons. The principal one was that she had met implacable resistance from management to her proposal that managers and owners should reduce their salaries and bonuses. Which meant that she would have had to start her tenure at S.M.P. with damaging cutbacks in staff. This was not only a breach of the promise she had been given when she accepted the job, but it would undercut her every attempt to bring about long-term change in order to strengthen the newspaper.



The second reason she gave was the revelation about Borgsjo. She wrote that she had been instructed to cover up the story, and this flew in the face of all she believed to be her job. It meant that she had no choice but to resign her position as editor. She concluded by saying that S.M.P.'s dire situation was not a personnel problem, but a management problem.



She read through the memo, corrected the typos, and emailed it to all the paper's employees. She sent a copy to Pressens Tidning, a media journal, and also to the trade magazine Journalisten. Then she packed away her laptop and went to see Holm at his desk.



"Goodbye," she said.



"Goodbye, Berger. It was hellish working with you."



They smiled at each other.



"One last thing," she said.



"Tell me?"



"Frisk has been working on a story I commissioned."



"Right, and nobody has any idea what it's about."



"Give him some support. He's come a long way, and I'll be staying in touch with him. Let him finish the job. I guarantee you'll be pleased with the result."



He looked wary. Then he nodded.



They did not shake hands. She left her card key on his desk and took the lift down to the garage. She parked her B.M.W. near the Millennium offices at a little after 4.00.