David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

“Is it the Iranians again?” somebody wondered.

“We think...” Ingram said.

He got no further. Ed Needham, the one who should have been standing there in the first place, explaining what was happening, interrupted him brusquely and got to his feet, a bear of a man, and at that moment there was no denying that he was an imposing sight. Gone was the deflated Ed from a minute before; he now exuded a tremendous sense of determination.

“No,” he hissed. “It’s a hacker, a fucking super-hacker, and I’m going to cut his balls off.”

“The female hacker doesn’t really have anything to do with this story,” Brandell said, nursing his beer. “She was probably more like Balder’s social project.”

“But she seemed to know her stuff.”

“Or she was just lucky. She talked a lot of rubbish.”

“So you met her?”

“Yes, just after Balder took off for Silicon Valley.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Almost a year. I’d moved our computers into my apartment on Brantingsgatan. My life was not great, to put it mildly. I was single and broke and hung over, my place looked like hell. I had just spoken to Balder on the telephone, and he’d been going on like some boring old dad. There was a lot of: don’t judge her by how she looks, appearances can be deceptive, blah blah and hey, he said that to me ! I’m not exactly the ideal son-in-law myself. I’ve never worn a jacket and tie in my entire life, and if anyone knows what people look like in the hacker community, then I do. Whatever, so I was sitting there waiting for this girl. Thought that she would at least knock. But she just opened the door and walked in.”

“What did she look like?”

“Bloody awful... but then, she was also sexy in a weird way. But dreadful!”

“Linus, I’m not asking you to rate her looks. I just want to know what she was wearing and if she maybe mentioned what her name was.”

“I have no idea who she was,” Brandell said, “although I did recognize her from somewhere — I had the feeling that it was something bad. She was tattooed and pierced and all that crap and looked like a heavy rocker or goth or punk, plus she was as thin as hell.”

Hardly aware that he was doing it, Blomkvist gestured to Amir to pull him another Guinness.

“What happened?” he said.

“Well, what can I say? I guess I thought that we didn’t have to get going right away, so I sat down on my bed — there wasn’t much else to sit on — and suggested that we might have a drink or something first. But do you know what she did then? She asked me to leave. She ordered me out of my own home, as if that was the most natural thing in the world, and obviously I refused. I was like: ‘I do actually live here.’ But she said, ‘Piss off, get lost,’ and I didn’t see what choice I had so I was out for a while. When I got back she was lying there on my bed, smoking, how sick is that? And reading a book about string theory or something, and maybe I gave her some sort of dodgy look, what do I know. She just said that she wasn’t planning on having sex with me, not even a little. ‘Not even a little,’ she said, and I don’t think she looked me in the eye even once. She just announced that we’d had a Trojan, a R.A.T., and that she recognized the pattern in the breach, the level of originality in the programming. ‘You’ve been blown,’ she said. And then she walked out.”

“Without saying goodbye?”

“Without a single damn word of goodbye.”

“Christ.”

“But to be honest I think she was just bullshitting. The guy at the N.D.R.E., who did the same investigation a little while later, and who probably knew much more about these kinds of attacks, was very clear that you couldn’t draw any conclusions like that, and that however much he searched through our computer he couldn’t find any old spyware. But still his guess was — Molde was his name, by the way, Stefan Molde — that we’d been hacked.”

“This woman, did she ever introduce herself in any way?”

“I did actually press her, but all she would say, and pretty surly she was too, was that I could call her Pippi. It was obvious that that wasn’t her real name, but still...”

“Still what?”

“I thought that it suited her somehow.”

“You know,” Blomkvist said, “I was just about to head home again.”

“Yes, I noticed that.”

“But now everything’s changed in a pretty major way. Didn’t you say that your Professor Balder knew this woman?”

“Well, yes.”

“In that case I want to talk to him as soon as possible.”

“Because of the woman?”

“Something like that.”

“O.K., fine,” Brandell said thoughtfully. “But you won’t find any contact details for him. He’s become so bloody secretive, like I said. Do you have an iPhone?”

“I do.”

“In that case you can forget it. Frans sees Apple as more or less in the pocket of the N.S.A. To talk to him you’ll have to buy a Blackphone or at least borrow an Android and download a special encryption program. But I’ll see to it that he gets in touch with you, so you can arrange to meet in some secure place.”

“Great, Linus. Thanks.”

Grane had just put on her coat to go home when Casales called again, and at first she was irritated, not only because of the confusion last time. She wanted to get going before the storm got out of hand. The news on the radio had forecast winds of up to thirty metres per second and the temperature falling to -10 °C, and she was not dressed for it.

“I’m sorry it took a while,” Casales said. “We’ve had an insane morning. Total chaos.”

“Here too,” Grane said politely, but looking at her watch.

“But I do have something important to tell you, as I said, at least I think I do. It isn’t that easy to analyse. I just started checking out a group of Russians, did I mention that?” Casales said.

“No.”

“Well, there are probably Germans and Americans involved as well and possibly one or more Swedes.”

“What sort of group are we talking about?”

“Criminals, sophisticated criminals who don’t rob banks or sell drugs any more. Instead they steal corporate secrets and confidential business information.”

“Black hats.”

“They’re not just hackers. They also blackmail and bribe people. Possibly they even carry out old-fashioned crimes, like murder. I don’t have much on them yet, to be honest, mostly codenames and unconfirmed links, and then a couple of real names, some young computer engineers in junior positions. The group is active in suspected industrial espionage and that’s why the case has ended up on my desk. We’re afraid that cutting-edge American technology has fallen into Russian hands.”

“I understand.”

“But it isn’t easy to get at them. They’re good at encryption and, no matter how hard I try, I haven’t been able to get any closer to whoever leads them than to catch that their boss goes by the name of Thanos.”

“Thanos?”

“Yes, derived from Thanatos, the god of death in Greek mythology, the one who’s the son of Nyx — night — and twin brother to Hypnos — sleep.”

“Real cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

“Actually, it’s pretty childish. Thanos is a supervillain in Marvel Comics, you know that series with heroes like the Hulk, Iron Man and Captain America. First of all it’s not particularly Russian, but more than that it’s... how shall I put it...?”