Stieg Larsson - The Girl who played with Fire

Salander’s voice darkened. She asked whether it was good practice to oblige her to report the company’s clients to the police force instead of resolving matters with much less trouble. Refik Alba apologized once more and repeated that he was powerless to circumvent company rules.

The name Zala was another dead end. With two breaks for Billy’s Pan Pizza, Salander spent most of the day at her computer with only a big bottle of Coca-Cola for company.

She found hundreds of Zalas – from an Italian athlete to a composer in Argentina. But she did not find the one she was looking for.

She tried Zalachenko, but that was a dead end too.

Frustrated, she stumbled into bed and slept for twelve hours straight. When she woke it was 11:00 a.m. She put on some coffee and ran a bath in the Jacuzzi. She poured in bubble bath and brought coffee and sandwiches for breakfast. She wished that she had Mimmi to keep her company, but she still had not even told her where she lived.

At noon she got out of the bath, towelled herself dry, and put on a bathrobe. She turned on the computer again.

The names Dag Svensson and Mia Johansson yielded better results. Via Google’s search engine she was able to quickly put together a brief summary of what they had been up to in recent years. She downloaded copies of some of Svensson’s articles and found a photographic byline of him. No great surprise that he was the man she had seen with Blomkvist at Kvarnen. The name had been given a face, and vice versa.

She found several texts about or by Mia Johansson. She had first come to the media’s attention with a report on the different treatment received by men and women at the hands of the law. There had been a number of editorials and articles in women’s organizations’ newsletters. Johansson herself had written several more articles. Salander read attentively. Some feminists found Johansson’s conclusions significant, others criticized her for “spreading bourgeois illusions.”

At 2:00 in the afternoon she went into Asphyxia 1.3, but instead of MikBlom/laptop she selected MikBlom/office , Blomkvist’s desktop computer at Millennium. She knew from experience that his office computer contained hardly anything of interest. Apart from the fact that he sometimes used it to surf the Net, he worked almost exclusively on his iBook. But he did have administrator rights for the whole Millennium office. She quickly found what she was looking for: the password for Millennium’s internal network.

To get into other computers at Millennium , the mirrored hard drive on the server in Holland was not sufficient. The original of MikBlom/office also had to be on and connected to the internal computer network. She was in luck. Blomkvist was apparently at work and had his desktop on. She waited ten minutes but could not see any sign of activity, which she took to indicate that he had turned on the computer when he came into the office and had possibly used it to surf the Net, then left it on while he did something else or used his laptop.

This had to be done carefully. During the next hour Salander hacked cautiously from one computer to another and downloaded email from Berger, Malm, and an employee whose name she did not recognize, Malin Eriksson. Finally she located Svensson’s desktop. According to the system information it was an older Macintosh PowerPC with a hard disk of only 750 MB, so it must be a leftover that was probably only used for word processing by occasional freelancers. It was linked to the computer network, which meant that Svensson was in Millennium’s editorial offices right now. She downloaded his email and searched his hard drive. She found a folder with the short but sweet name.

The blond giant had just picked up 203,000 kronor in cash, which was an unexpectedly large sum for the three kilos of methamphetamine he had delivered to Lundin in late January. It was a tidy profit for a few hours of practical work – collecting the meth from the courier, storing it for a while, making delivery to Lundin, and then taking 50 percent of the profit. Svavelsjö MC could turn over that amount every month, and Lundin’s gang was only one of three such operations – the other two were around Göteborg and Malmö. Together the gangs brought him roughly half a million kronor in profit every month.

And yet he was in such a bad mood that he pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the engine. He had not slept for thirty hours and was feeling fuzzy. He got out to stretch his legs and take a piss. The night was cool and the stars were bright. He was not far from Järna.

The conflict he was having was almost ideological in nature. The potential supply of methamphetamine was limitless within a radius of 250 miles from Stockholm. The demand was indisputably huge. The rest was logistics – how to transport the product from point A to point B, or to be more precise, from a cellar workshop in Tallinn to the Free Port in Stockholm.

This was a recurring problem – how to guarantee regular transport from Estonia to Sweden? In fact it was the main problem and the weak link, since after several years he was still improvising every time. And fuckups had been all too frequent lately. He was proud of his ability to organize. He had built up a well-oiled network cultivated with equal portions of carrot and stick. He was the one who had done the legwork, cemented partnerships, negotiated deals, and made sure that the deliveries got to the right place.

The carrot was the incentive offered to subcontractors like Lundin – a solid and relatively risk-free profit. The system was a good one. Lundin did not have to lift a finger to get the goods – no stressful buying trips or dealings with people who could be anyone from the drug squad to the Russian mafia. Lundin knew that the giant would deliver and then collect his 50 percent.

The stick was for when complications arose. A gabby street dealer who had found out far too much about the supply chain had almost implicated Svavelsjö MC. He had been forced to get involved and punish the guy.

He was good at dealing out punishment.

But the operation was becoming too burdensome to oversee.

He lit a cigarette and stretched his legs against a gate into a field.

Methamphetamine was a discreet and easy-to-manage source of income – big profits, small risks. Weapons were risky, and considering the risks they were simply not good business.

Occasionally industrial espionage or smuggling electronic components to Eastern Europe – even though the market had dropped off in recent years – was justifiable.

Whores from the Baltics, on the other hand, were an entirely unsatisfactory investment. The business was small change, and liable at any time to set off hypocritical screeds in the media and debates in that strange political entity called the Swedish parliament. The one advantage was that everybody likes a whore – prosecutors, judges, policemen, even an occasional member of parliament. Nobody was going to dig too deep to bring that business down.

Even a dead whore would not necessarily cause a political uproar. If the police could catch a suspect within a few hours who still had bloodstains on his clothes, then a conviction would follow and the murderer would spend several years in prison or some other obscure institution. But if no suspect was found within forty-eight hours, the police would soon enough find more important things to investigate, as he knew from experience.

He did not like the trade in whores, though. He did not like them at all, their makeup-plastered faces and shrill, drunken laughter. They were unclean. And there was always the risk that one of them would get the idea she could seek asylum or start blabbing to the police or to reporters. Then he would have to take matters into his own hands and mete out punishment. And if the revelation was blatant enough, prosecutors and police would be forced to act – otherwise parliament really would wake up and pay attention. The whore business sucked.