David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

Kira was staggeringly beautiful and knew how to make the most of it like no other beauty before her. She was unmatched when it came to power games; she knew all the moves. She could be weak and needy when it suited, but also indomitable, hard and cold as ice, and sometimes plain evil. Nobody brought out the sadist in him like she did.

She may not have been intelligent in the conventional sense, and many pointed that out to try to take her down a peg or two. But the same people were still stupefied in her presence. Kira played them like a violin and could reduce even the toughest of men to blushing and giggling schoolchildren.

It was 9.00 and Bogdanov was sitting next to him shovelling in the lamb chop Holtser had prepared. Oddly enough his table manners were almost passable. That may have been Kira’s influence. In many ways Bogdanov had become quite civilized — and then again not. However he tried to put on airs, he could never entirely rid himself of the appearance of the petty thief and speed addict. He had been off drugs for ages and was a computer engineer with university qualifications, but still looked ravaged by street life.

“Where’s your bling watch?” Holtser said. “Are you in the doghouse?”

“We both are.”

“It’s that bad?”

“Maybe not.”

“The job isn’t finished, you said?”

“No, it’s that boy.”

“Which boy?” Holtser pretended not to understand.

“The one you so nobly spared.”

“What about him? He’s a retard, you know.”

“Maybe so, but he can draw.”

“What do you mean, draw?”

“He’s a savant.”

“A what ?”

“You should try reading something other than your fucking gun magazines for once.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s someone who’s autistic or handicapped in some other way, but who has a special gift. This boy may not be able to talk or think like a normal person, but he has a photographic memory. The police think the little bastard is going to be able to draw your face, and then they’re going to run it through their facial-recognition software, and then you’re screwed, aren’t you? You must be there somewhere in Interpol’s records?”

“Yes, but Kira can’t expect us to—”

“That’s exactly what she expects. We have to fix the boy.”

A wave of emotion and confusion washed over Holtser and once again he saw before him that empty, glassy look from the double bed which had made him feel so uncomfortable.

“The hell I will,” he said, without really believing it.

“I know you’ve got problems with children. I don’t like it either. But we can’t avoid this one. Besides, you should be grateful. Kira could just as easily have sacrificed you.”

“I suppose so.”

“Then it’s settled. I’ve got the plane tickets in my pocket. We’ll take the first flight in the morning to Arlanda, at 6.30, and then we’re going to some place on Sveavägen called Oden’s Medical Centre for Children and Adolescents.”

“So the boy’s in a clinic.”

“Yes, and that’s why we need to do some planning. Let me just finish eating.”

The man who called himself Jan Holtser closed his eyes and tried to figure out what he was going to say to Olga.

Salander was up at 5.00 in the morning and hacked into the N.S.F. Major Research Institute supercomputer at the New Jersey Institute of Technology — she needed all the mathematical skills she could muster. Then she got out her own program for elliptic curve factorization and set about cracking the file she had downloaded from the N.S.A.

But however hard she tried, she could not manage it. She had not really been expecting to do so. It was a sophisticated encryption, named after the originators Rivest, Shamir and Adleman. R.S.A. has two keys — one public, one secret — and is based on Euler’s phi function and Fermat’s little theorem, but above all on the simple fact that it is easy to multiply two large prime numbers. A calculator will give you the answer in the blink of an eye. Yet it is all but impossible to work backwards and, on the basis of the answer, calculate the prime numbers you started out with. Computers are not yet efficient at prime-number factorization, something which had exasperated Lisbeth Salander and the world’s intelligence organizations many times in the past.

For about a year now Salander had been thinking that E.C.M., the Elliptic Curve Method, would be more promising than previous algorithms, and she had spent long nights writing her own factorization program. But now, in the early hours of the morning, she realized it would need more refinement to have even the slightest chance of success. After three hours of work, she took a break and went to the kitchen, drank some orange juice straight from the carton and ate two microwaved piroshki.

Back at her desk she hacked into Blomkvist’s computer to see if he had come up with anything new. He had posted two more questions for her and she realized at once: he wasn’t so hopeless after all.

he wrote. And that was a reasonable question.

But she did not answer. She could not care less about Arvid Wrange. And she had made progress and worked out who the hollow-eyed junkie was, the man Wrange had been in touch with, who had called himself Bogey. Trinity in Hacker Republic remembered somebody with that same handle from a number of sites some years previously. That did not necessarily mean anything — Bogey was not the most original alias. But Salander had traced the posts and thought she could be onto something — especially when he carelessly dropped that he was a computer engineer from Moscow University.

Salander was unable to find out when he graduated, or any other dates for that matter, but she got hold of a couple of nerdy details about how Bogey was hooked on fine watches and crazy for the Arsène Lupin films from the ’70s, about the gentleman thief of that name.

Then Salander posted questions on every conceivable website for former and current students at Moscow University, asking if anybody knew a scrawny, hollow-eyed ex-junkie who had been a street urchin and master thief and loved Arsène Lupin films. It was not long before she got a reply.

“That sounds like Jurij Bogdanov,” wrote someone who introduced herself as Galina.

According to this Galina, Bogdanov was a legend at the university. Not just because he had hacked into all the lecturers’ computers and had dirt on every one of them. He was always asking people: will you bet me one hundred roubles I can’t break into that house over there?

Many who did not know him thought this was easy money. But Jurij could pick any door lock, and if for some reason he failed he would shin up the facade or the walls instead. He was known for his daring, and for his evil. He was said once to have kicked a dog to death when it disturbed him in his work and he was always stealing things, just for the hell of it. Galina thought he might have been a kleptomaniac. But he was also a genius hacker and a talented analyst, and after he graduated the world was his oyster. He did not want a job, he wanted to go his own way, he said, and it did not take Salander long to work out what he got up to after university — at least according to the official version.

Jurij Bogdanov was now thirty-four years old. He had left Russia and lived in Berlin on Budapester Strasse, not far from the Michelin-starred restaurant Hugo’s. He ran a white-hat computer security business — Outcast Security — with seven employees and a turnover in the last financial year of twenty-two million euros. It was ironic — yet somehow entirely logical — that his front was a company which protected industrial groups from people like himself. He had not had any criminal convictions since he took his exams in 2009 and managed a wide network of contacts — one of the members of his board of directors was Ivan Gribanov, member of the Russian Duma and a major shareholder in the oil company Gazprom — but she could find nothing to get her further.