Stieg Larsson - The Girl who played with Fire

To his astonishment the countdown stopped with six seconds to go. Then the alarm beeped one last time before the display was reset to zero and a green light came on.

Salander opened her eyes wide. She thought she had to be seeing things and actually shook her PDA, which she realized was irrational. The countdown had stopped six seconds before the paint bomb was supposed to explode. And a second later the display reset to zero.

Impossible.

No other person in the world knew the code.

How could it be possible? The police? No. Zala? Inconceivable.

She dialled a number on her mobile and waited for the surveillance camera to connect and begin to send low-resolution images through.

The camera was hidden in what looked like a smoke detector in the hall ceiling, and it took a low-res photograph every second. She played back the sequence from zero, the moment the door was opened and the alarm activated. Then a lopsided smile spread across her face as she looked down at Mikael Blomkvist, who for half a minute acted out a jerky pantomime before he finally punched in the code and then leaned on the doorjamb looking as though he had just avoided having a heart attack.

Kalle Fucking Blomkvist had tracked her down.

He had the keys she had dropped on Lundagatan. He was smart enough to remember that Wasp was her handle on the Net. And if he had found the apartment, then he had probably also worked out that it was owned by Wasp Enterprises. As she watched he began to move jerkily down the hall and disappeared from the camera’s view.

Shit. How could I have been so predictable? And why did I drop those keys?… Now her every secret lay open to Blomkvist’s prying eyes.

After thinking about it for a couple of minutes she decided that it no longer made any difference. She had erased the hard drive. That was the important thing. It could even be to her advantage that he was the one to have found her hideout. He already knew more of her secrets than anyone else did. Practical Pig would do the right thing. He would not sell her out. She hoped. She put the car in drive and pressed on, deep in thought, towards Göteborg.

Eriksson ran into Paolo Roberto in the stairwell to Millennium’s offices when she arrived at 8:30. She recognized him at once, introduced herself, and let him in. He had a bad limp. She smelled coffee and knew that Berger was already there.

“Hello, Erika. Thanks for agreeing to see me at such short notice,” the boxer said.

Berger studied the impressive collection of bruises and lumps on his face before she leaned forward and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

“You look like shit,” she said.

“I’ve broken my nose before. Where are you keeping Blomkvist?”

“He’s out somewhere playing detective, looking for leads. As usual it’s impossible to get hold of him. Except for a strange email last night I haven’t heard from him since yesterday morning. Thank you for… well, thanks.”

She pointed to his face.

Paolo Roberto laughed.

“Would you like coffee? You said you had something to tell me. Malin, join us.”

They sat in the comfortable chairs in Berger’s office.

“It’s that big blond fucker I had the fight with. I told Mikael that his boxing wasn’t worth a rotten lingonberry. But the funny thing was, he kept assuming the defensive position with his fists and circled around as if he were a boxer. It seemed as if he had actually had some sort of training.”

“Mikael mentioned that on the phone yesterday,” Eriksson said.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so yesterday when I got home I sat down and sent out emails to boxing clubs all over Europe. I described what had happened and gave as detailed a description as I could of the guy.”

“Did you have any luck?”

“I think I got a nibble.”

He put a faxed photograph on the table in front of Berger and Eriksson. It looked to have been taken during a training session at a boxing club. Two boxers were standing listening to instructions from a heavyset older man in a narrow-brimmed leather hat and tracksuit. Half a dozen people were hanging around the ring listening. In the background stood a large man who looked like a skinhead. A circle had been drawn around him with a marker pen.

“The picture is seventeen years old. The guy in the background is Ronald Niedermann. He was eighteen when the picture was taken, so he should be about thirty-five now. That fits with the giant that kidnapped Miriam Wu. I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that it’s him. The picture is a little too old and it’s poor quality. But I can say that he looks quite similar.”

“Where did you get the picture?”

“I got an answer from Hans Münster, a veteran trainer at Dynamic in Hamburg. Ronald Niedermann boxed for them for a year in the late eighties. Or rather, he tried to box for them. I got the email first thing this morning and called Münster before I came here. To sum up what Münster said: Niedermann is from Hamburg and hung out with a skinhead gang in the eighties. He has a brother a few years older, a very talented boxer, and it was through him that he joined the club. Niedermann had fearsome strength and a physique that was almost unparalleled. Münster said that he’d never seen anyone hit so hard, not even among the elite. They measured the weight of his punch one time and he went right off the scale.”

“It sounds as though he could have made a career in the ring,” Berger said.

Paolo Roberto shook his head. “According to Münster he was impossible, for several reasons. First, he couldn’t learn to box. He would stand still throwing haymakers. He was phenomenally clumsy – that fits the guy I fought in Nykvarn – but what was worse, he didn’t understand his own strength. Now and then he’d land a punch that would cause a horrible injury during sparring practice. There were broken noses and jaws – a whole series of unnecessary injuries. They just couldn’t keep him around.”

“So he could box, but not really. Is that it?” Eriksson said.

“Exactly. But the reason for him stopping was medical.”

“How do you mean?”

“He was apparently invulnerable. It didn’t matter how many punches he took, he just shook them off and kept fighting. It turned out that he suffers from a very rare condition called congenital analgesia. I looked it up. It’s an inherited genetic defect that means the transmitter substance in his nerve synapses doesn’t function properly. Or in lay terms, he can’t feel pain.”

“That sounds like a gold mine for a boxer.”

Paolo Roberto shook his head once more. “On the contrary. It can be a life-threatening disorder. Most people with congenital analgesia die relatively young, between twenty and twenty-five. Pain is the body’s warning system that something’s wrong. If you put your hand on a red-hot burner, it hurts and you snatch it away. But if you have this disease you don’t do anything until you start smelling burned flesh.”

Eriksson and Berger looked at each other.

“Are you serious?” Berger said.

“Absolutely. Niedermann can’t feel a thing, and he goes around as if he’s had a massive dose of local anaesthesia twenty-four hours a day. He’s managed to deal with it because he has another genetic feature that compensates for it. He has an extraordinary build with an extremely strong skeleton, which makes him almost invulnerable. His raw strength is damn near unique. And above all, he must heal easily.”

“I’m beginning to understand what an interesting boxing match it must have been.”

“It certainly was that. I wouldn’t want to do it again. The only thing that made an impression on him was when Miriam Wu kicked him in the balls. He actually fell to his knees for a second… which must be because there’s some sort of physical reaction connected to a blow of that type, since he doesn’t feel any pain. And believe me – even I would have collapsed if she had kicked me like that.”