David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

“He couldn’t help but build his monsters.”

“A bit like that, though that’s putting it drastically.”

“How far had he got?”

“Further, I think, than anyone could imagine, and that may have been yet another reason why he was so secretive about his work at Solifon. He was afraid his program would end up in the wrong hands. He was even afraid the program would come into contact with the internet and merge with it. He called it August, after his son.”

“And where is it now?”

“He never went anywhere without it. It must have been right by the bed when he was shot. But the terrible thing is that the police say there was no computer there.”

“I didn’t see one either. But then my focus was elsewhere.”

“It must have been dreadful.”

“Perhaps you heard that I also saw the man who killed him,” Blomkvist said. “He was carrying a rucksack.”

“That doesn’t sound good. But with a bit of luck the computer will turn up somewhere in the house.”

“Let’s hope so. Do you have any idea who stole his technology the first time around?”

“Yes, I do, as a matter of fact.”

“That interests me a lot.”

“I can see that. But the sad thing is that I have some personal responsibility for this mess. Frans was working himself to death, you see, and I was worried he would burn out. That was about the time he had lost custody of August.”

“When was that?”

“Two years ago. He was utterly worn out. He wasn’t sleeping, and he went around blaming himself, yet he was incapable of dropping his research. He threw himself into it as if it were all he had left in life, and so I arranged for him to get some assistants who could take some of the load. I let him have my best students. I knew, of course, that none of them was a model of probity, but they were ambitious and gifted, and their admiration for Frans was boundless. Everything looked promising. But then...”

“His technology was stolen.”

“He had clear proof of that when the application from Truegames was submitted to the U.S. Patent Office in August last year. Every unique aspect of his technology had been duplicated and written down there — it was obvious. At first they all suspected their computers had been hacked, but I was sceptical from the start — I knew how sophisticated Frans’ encryption was. But since there was no other plausible explanation, that was the initial assumption, and for a while maybe Frans believed it himself. It was nonsense of course.”

“What are you saying?” Blomkvist burst out. “Surely the data breach was confirmed by experts.”

“Yes, by some idiot show-off at the N.D.R.E. But that was just Frans’ way of protecting his boys, or it could have been more than that. I suspect he also wanted to play detective, although heaven knows how he could be so stupid. You see...” Farah took a deep breath, “I learned all this only a few weeks ago. Frans and little August were here for dinner and I sensed at once that he had something important to tell me. It was hanging in the air. After a couple of glasses he asked me to put away my mobile and began to speak in a whisper. I have to admit that at first I was simply irritated. He was going on again about his young hacker genius.”

“Hacker genius?” Blomkvist said, trying to sound neutral.

“A girl he spoke about so much that it was doing my head in. I won’t bore you with the full story, but she’d turned up out of the blue at one of his lectures and practically lectured him on the concept of singularity. She impressed Frans, and he started to open up to her — it’s understandable. A mega-nerd like Frans can’t have found all that many people he could talk to at his own level, and when he realized that the girl was also a hacker he asked her to take a look at their computers. At the time they had all the equipment at the home of a guy called Linus Brandell, one of the assistants.”

All Blomkvist said was, “Linus Brandell.”

“Yes,” Farah said. “The girl came round to his place in Östermalm and just threw him out. Then she got to work on the computers. She couldn’t find any sign of a breach, but she didn’t leave it at that. She had a list of Frans’ assistants and hacked them all from Linus’ computer. It didn’t take long for her to realize that one of them had sold him out to none other than Solifon.”

“And who was it?”

“Frans didn’t want to tell me, even though I pressed him. But the girl apparently called him directly from Linus’ apartment. Frans was in San Francisco at the time, and you can imagine: betrayed by one of his own! I was expecting him to report the guy right away and raise hell. But he had a better idea. He asked the girl to pretend they really had been hacked.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He didn’t want any traces of evidence to be tidied away. He wanted to understand more about what had happened. I suppose it makes sense — for one of the world’s leading software businesses to steal and exploit his technology was obviously far more serious than if some good-for-nothing, unprincipled shit of a student had done the same. Because Solifon isn’t just one of the most respected research groups in the U.S.A., they had also been trying to recruit Frans for years. He was livid. ‘Those bastards were trying to seduce me, and they stole from me at the same time,’ he growled.”

“Let me be sure I’ve got this right.” Blomkvist said. “You’re saying he took a job at Solifon in order to find out why and how they’d stolen from him?”

“If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s just how difficult it can be to understand a person’s motivation. The salary and the freedom and the resources obviously came into it. But apart from that, yes, I imagine you’re right. He’d worked out that Solifon was involved in the theft even before this hacker girl examined his computers. She gave him the specific information and that enabled him to dig into the mess. In the end it turned out to be much more difficult than he expected, and people started getting very suspicious. It wasn’t long before he became fantastically unpopular, so he kept more and more to himself. But he did find something.”

“What?”

“This is where it all gets sensitive. I really shouldn’t be telling you.”

“Yet here we are.”

“Yet here we are. Not only because I’ve always had the utmost respect for your journalism. It occurred to me this morning that it may not have been a coincidence that Frans rang you last night rather than Säpo’s Industry Protection Group, whom he had also been in touch with. I think he was beginning to suspect a leak there. It may have been no more than paranoia — Frans displayed a variety of symptoms of persecution mania — but it was you he called, and now I hope that I can fulfil his wish.”

“I hope you can.”

“At Solifon there’s a department called ‘Y’,” Farah said. “Google X is the model, the department where they work on ‘moonshots’, as they call them, wild and far-fetched ideas, like looking for eternal life or connecting search engines to brain neurons. If any place will achieve A.G.I. or A.S.I., that’s probably it. Frans was assigned to ‘Y’. But that wasn’t as smart as it may have sounded.”

“And why not?”

“Because he had found out from his hacker girl that there was a secret group of business intelligence analysts at ‘Y’, headed up by a character called Zigmund Eckerwald, also known as Zeke.”