David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

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Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist have not been in touch for some time.
Then Blomkvist is contacted by renowned Swedish scientist Professor Balder. Warned that his life is in danger, but more concerned for his son’s well-being, Balder wants
to publish his story — and it is a terrifying one.
More interesting to Blomkvist than Balder’s world-leading advances in Artificial Intelligence, is his connection with a certain female superhacker.
It seems that Salander, like Balder, is a target of ruthless cyber gangsters — and a violent criminal conspiracy that will very soon bring terror to the snowbound streets of Stockholm, to the
team, and to Blomkvist and Salander themselves.

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“Sonja, my dear. There you are!”

She decided not to comment on the unwonted enthusiasm of his greeting and went straight to the point.

“Jan Holtser is dead.”

“Oh no.”

“And with him went our last hope of learning more about the Spiders.”

“So you think he was about to open up?”

“There was a chance, at least.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He broke down completely when his daughter showed up.”

“I didn’t know. What happened?”

“He has a daughter called Olga,” Modig said. “She came from Helsinki when she heard that her father had been injured. But when I talked to her and she heard that he had tried to kill a child, she went berserk.”

“In what way?”

“She stormed in to him and said something incredibly aggressive in Russian.”

“Could you understand what she was saying?”

“Something like he could die alone and she hated him.”

“So she laid into him.”

“Yes, and afterwards she told me that she would do everything in her power to help us with the investigation.”

“And how did Holtser react?”

“That’s what I was saying. For a moment I thought we had him. He was totally destroyed, had tears in his eyes. I’m not really big on that Catholic teaching which says that our moral worth is determined just before we die. But it was almost touching to see. This man who had done so much evil was crushed.”

“My rabbi—”

“Please, Jan, don’t start with your rabbi now. Let me go on. Holtser said what a terrible person he had been, so I told him that he should as a Christian take the opportunity to confess, and tell us who he was working for, and at that moment I’m convinced he came close. He hesitated and his eyes flitted from side to side. But instead of confessing he began to talk about Stalin.”

“Stalin?”

“About how Stalin didn’t punish only the guilty but also their children and grandchildren and the entire family. I think he was trying to say that his boss was the same.”

“So he was worried about his daughter.”

“However much she may have hated him, he was. I tried to tell him that we could get the girl onto a witness protection programme, but Holtser had started to drift away. He fell unconscious and died an hour later.”

“Anything else?”

“Only that someone we’re beginning to think may be a superintelligence has vanished and that we still have no trace of Andrei Zander.”

“I know, I know.”

“We’ve at least made progress on one front,” Modig said. “You remember the man identified by Amanda on August’s drawing of the traffic light?”

“The former actor?”

“That’s right, he’s called Roger Winter. Amanda interviewed him for background information, to find out whether there was a relationship between him and the boy or Balder, and I don’t think she expected to get much out of it. But Winter seemed to be badly shaken, and before Amanda had even begun to put pressure on him he confessed to a whole catalogue of sins.”

“Really?”

“And we’re not talking innocent stories. You know, Westman and Winter have been friends since they were young men at Revolutionsteatern and they used to get together to drink in the afternoons at the apartment in Torsgatan when Hanna was out. August would sit in the next room doing his puzzles, and neither of the men paid him much attention. But on one of these occasions the boy had been given a thick maths book by his mother — it was clearly way above his level, but he still leafed through it frantically, making excited noises. Lasse became irritated and grabbed the book from the boy and threw it in the bin. It seems August went completely crazy. He had some sort of fit, and Lasse kicked him several times.”

“That’s appalling.”

“That was just the beginning. After that August became very odd, Roger said. The boy took to glaring at them with this weird look, and one day Roger found that his jeans jacket had been cut into tiny pieces, and another day someone had emptied out all the beer in the fridge and smashed all the bottles of spirits. It turned into some kind of trench warfare, and I suspect that Roger and Lasse in their alcoholic delirium began to imagine all sorts of strange things about the boy, and even became scared of him. The psychological aspect of this isn’t easy to understand. Roger said it made him feel like shit, and he never talked about it with Lasse afterwards. He didn’t want to beat the boy. But he couldn’t stop himself. It was as if he got his own childhood back, he said.”

“What on earth did he mean by that?”

“It’s not altogether clear. Apparently Roger Winter has a disabled younger brother. Throughout their childhood Roger was a constant disappointment, while his talented brother was showered with praise and distinctions, and appreciated in every possible way. I guess that bred some bitterness. Maybe Roger was subconsciously getting his own back on his brother. Or else...”

“Or else what?”

“He put it in an odd way. He said it felt as if he were trying to beat the shame out of himself.”

“That’s sick.”

“Yes. Strangest thing of all is the way he suddenly confessed everything. It was almost as if he wanted to be arrested. Amanda said he was limping and had two black eyes.”

“Peculiar.”

“Isn’t it? But there’s one other thing which surprises me even more,” Modig said.

“And what’s that?”

“That my boss, that brooding old grouch, has become a little ray of sunshine.”

Bublanski looked embarrassed. “So it shows.”

“It shows.”

“Well, yes,” he stammered. “It’s just that a woman has agreed to come out to dinner with me.”

“You haven’t gone and fallen in love, have you?”

“It’s just dinner,” Bublanski said, blushing.

Needham did not enjoy it. But he knew the rules of the game. It was like being back in Dorchester. Whatever you did, you could not back down. If Salander wanted to play hardball, he would show her hardball. He glared at her. But it did not get him very far.

She glared back and did not say a word. It felt like a duel, and in the end Needham looked away. This whole thing was ridiculous. The girl had been unmasked and crushed after all. He had cracked her secret identity and tracked her down, and she should be grateful that he wasn’t marching in with the Marines to arrest her.

“You think you’re pretty tough, don’t you?” he said.

“I don’t like surprise visits.”

“I don’t like people who break into my system, so we’re square. Maybe you’d like to know how I found you?”

“I couldn’t care less.”

“It was via your company in Gibraltar. Not too smart to call it Wasp Enterprises.”

“Apparently not.”

“For a smart girl, you make a lot of mistakes.”

“For a clever boy, you work for a pretty rotten set-up.”

“You got me there. But we’re a necessary evil in this wicked world.”

“Especially with guys like Jonny Ingram around.”

He was not expecting that. He really was not expecting that. But he would not let it show.

“You have quite a sense of humour,” he said.

“It’s hilarious, isn’t it? To have people murdered and to work together with villains in the Russian Duma making megabucks and saving your own skin, that’s really comical, isn’t it?” she said.

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