Stieg Larsson - The Girl who played with Fire

Let me add that I hope everything is well with you. I very much enjoyed your surprise visit of last summer, and must tell you that I found your company refreshing. I look forward to being of further service as necessary.

Yours sincerely,

J.S.M.

The letter was dated January 24. Salander apparently did not pick up her mail very often. Blomkvist looked at the attached documentation for the purchase of an apartment in a building at Fiskargatan 9 in Mosebacke.

Then he almost choked on his coffee. The price paid was twenty-five million kronor, and the deal was concluded with two payments a year apart.

Salander watched a solid, dark-haired man unlock the side door of Auto-Expert in Eskilstuna. It was a garage, a repair shop, and a car rental agency. A typical franchise. It was 6:50, and according to a handwritten sign on the front door, the shop did not open until 7:30. She went across the street and followed the man through the side door into the shop. The man heard her and turned round.

“Refik Alba?” she said.

“Yes. Who are you? I’m not open yet.”

She raised Nieminen’s P-83 Wanad and held the weapon with two hands aimed at his face.

“I don’t want to haggle with you. I just want to see your list of cars rented out. I want to see it now. You have ten seconds to produce it.”

Refik Alba was forty-two years old, a Kurd born in Diyarbakir, and he had seen his fill of guns. He stood as if paralyzed. Then he concluded that if this crazy woman came into his garage with a pistol in her hand, there was not going to be much to discuss.

“It’s on the computer,” he said.

“Turn it on.”

He did as she told him.

“What’s behind that door?” she asked as the computer booted up and the screen began to flicker.

“It’s just a closet.”

“Open it.”

It contained some overalls.

“OK. Go into the closet, stay calm, and I won’t have to hurt you.”

He obeyed her without protest.

“Take out your mobile, put it on the floor, and kick it over to me.”

He did as she said.

“Good. Now close the door behind you.”

It was an antique PC with Windows 95 and a 280 MB hard drive. It took an eternity to open the Excel document with the car rental listing. The white Volvo had been rented on two occasions. First for two weeks in January, and then from March 1. It had not yet been returned. He was paying a weekly fee for a long-term rental.

The name was Ronald Niedermann.

She looked through the folders on the shelf above the computer. One of them had the label IDENTIFICATION printed neatly on it. She took the folder down and paged through to Ronald Niedermann. When he rented the car in January he had given his passport as ID, and Refik Alba had made a photocopy. She recognized the blond hulk at once. According to the passport he was German, thirty-five years old, born in Hamburg. The fact that Alba had made a copy from the passport showed that Niedermann was just a customer, not a friend.

At the bottom of the page Alba had written a mobile number and a P.O. box address in Göteborg.

Salander replaced the folder and turned off the computer. She looked around and found a rubber doorstop next to the front door. She picked it up and went back to the closet and knocked on the door with the barrel of her gun.

“Can you hear me in there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who I am?”

Silence.

He’d have to be blind not to recognize me.

“OK. You know who I am. Are you afraid of me?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be afraid of me, Herr Alba. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m almost finished here. I’m sorry for putting you to this trouble.”

“Uh… OK.”

“Have you got enough air to breathe in there?”

“Yes… what do you want, anyway?”

“I wanted to see whether a certain woman had hired a car from you two years ago,” she lied. “I didn’t find what I wanted, but it’s not your fault. I’ll be leaving in a few minutes. I’m going to put the doorstop under the closet door here. The door is thin enough for you to break your way out, but it will take a while. You don’t have to call the police. You’ll never see me again, and you can open up as usual today and pretend that this never happened.”

The chances of him not calling the police were pretty remote, but it did not hurt to give him the option to think about. She left the garage and walked to the Toyota Corolla around the corner, where she swiftly changed into Irene Nesser.

She was annoyed not to have found a street address for Ronald Niedermann in the Stockholm area, just a P.O. box address on the other side of Sweden. But it was the only lead she had. So, to Göteborg.

She made for the E20 and turned west towards Arboga. She turned on the radio, but she had just missed the news and got some commercial station. She listened to David Bowie singing “putting out fire with gasoline.” She didn’t know the name of the song, but she took the words as prophetic.

Blomkvist looked at the entrance door of Fiskargatan 9. It was one of Stockholm’s most exclusive addresses. He put the key in the lock and it turned perfectly. The list of residents in the lobby was no help. Blomkvist assumed it would be mostly corporate apartments, but there seemed to be one or two private residences among them. It hardly surprised him that Salander’s name was not listed, yet it still seemed unlikely that this would be her hideout.

He walked up floor by floor, reading the nameplates on the doors. None of them rang a bell. Then he got to the top floor and read

V. KULLA.

Blomkvist slapped his forehead. He had to smile. The choice of name may not have been intended to make fun of him personally; it was more likely some private ironic reflection of Salander’s – but where else should Kalle Blomkvist, nicknamed for an Astrid Lindgren character, look for her than at Pippi Longstocking’s Villa Villekulla?

He rang the doorbell and waited a minute. Then he took out the keys and unfastened the dead bolt and the bottom lock.

The instant he opened the door, the burglar alarm device was activated.

Salander’s mobile began beeping. She was near Glanshammar just outside Örebro. She braked and pulled onto the shoulder. She took her Palm from her jacket pocket and plugged it into her phone.

Fifteen seconds earlier someone had opened the door to her apartment. The alarm was not connected to any security company. Its only purpose was to alert her that someone had broken in or had opened the door in some other way. After thirty seconds an alarm bell would go off and the uninvited visitor would get an unpleasant surprise in the form of a paint bomb hidden in a fake fuse box next to the door. She smiled in anticipation and counted down the seconds.

Blomkvist stared in frustration at the alarm display by the door. For some reason he hadn’t even thought that the apartment might have an alarm. He watched the digital clock counting down. Millennium’s alarm was triggered if someone failed to key in the correct four-digit code within thirty seconds, and shortly thereafter a couple of muscular guys from a security company would come through the door.

His first impulse was to close the door and make a quick exit from the building. But he just stood there, frozen to the spot.

Four digits. Impossible to guess the code at random.

25-24-23-22…

Damned Pippi Long…

19-18…

What code would you use?

15-14-13…

He felt his panic growing.

10-9-8…

Then he raised his hand and desperately punched in the only number he could think of: 9277. The numbers that corresponded to the letters W-A-S-P on the keypad.