David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

“I know just as well as you do that there’s a leak in the police team. At this stage we could benefit from unlikely alliances.”

“Absolutely. I’m sorry, but I have to press on.”

“O.K.,” Grane said, obviously disappointed. “I’ll pretend this call never happened. Good luck now.”

“Thanks,” Berger said, and went back to searching through her contacts.

Grane went back to the meeting room, her mind whirling. What was it that Erika had wanted? She did not fully understand and yet she had a vague idea. As she came back into the room the conversation died and everyone looked at her.

“What was that about?” Kraft said.

“Something private.”

“That you had to deal with now?”

“That I had to deal with. How far had you got?”

“We were talking about what happened on Sveavägen,” said Ragnar Olofsson, the head of division, “but as I was saying, we don’t yet have enough information. The situation is chaotic, and it looks as if we’re losing our source in Bublanski’s group. The detective inspector seems to have become paranoid.”

“You can’t blame him,” Grane said.

“Well... perhaps not. We’ve talked about that too. We’ll leave no stone unturned until we know how the attacker worked out that the boy was at the medical centre and that he was going to go out by the front door when he did. No effort will be spared, I need hardly say. But I must emphasize that a leak did not necessarily come from within the police. The information was quite widely known — at the medical centre of course, by the mother and her unreliable partner Lasse Westman, and in the offices of Millennium . And we can’t rule out hacker attacks. I’ll come back to that. If I might continue with my report?”

“Please.”

“We’ve been discussing how Mikael Blomkvist comes into this, and this is where we’re worried. How could he know about a shooting before it happens? In my opinion, he’s got some source close to the criminals themselves, and I see no reason for us to tiptoe around his efforts to protect those sources. We have to find out where he got his information from.”

“The more so since he seems desperate and will do anything for a scoop,” Superintendent Mårten Nielsen said.

“It would appear that Mårten has some excellent sources too. He reads the evening papers,” Grane said acidly.

“Not the evening papers, sweetie. T.T. — a source which even we at Säpo regard as fairly reliable.”

“That was absurd and defamatory, and you know it as well as I do,” Grane said.

“I had no idea you were so besotted with Blomkvist.”

“Idiot!”

“Stop this at once!” Kraft said. “This is ridiculous behaviour! Carry on, Ragnar. What do we know about what happened?”

“The first people on the scene were two regular police officers, Erik Sandström and Tord Landgren,” Olofsson said. “My information comes from them. They were there on the dot of 9.24, and by then it was all over. Torkel Lindén was dead, shot in the back of the head, and the boy, well, we don’t know. According to witnesses, he was hit too. We have blood in the street. But nothing is confirmed. The boy was driven away in a red Volvo — we do at least have parts of the registration number plus the model of the vehicle. We’ll get the name of its owner very shortly.”

Grane noticed that Kraft was writing everything down, just as she had done at their earlier meetings.

“But what actually happened?” she said.

“According to two students from the School of Economics who were standing on the opposite side of Sveavägen, it looked like a settling of scores between two criminal gangs who were both after the boy.”

“Sounds far-fetched.”

“I’m not so sure,” Olofsson said.

“What makes you say that?” Kraft said.

“There were professionals on both sides. The assailant seems to have been standing and watching the door from a low green wall on the other side of Sveavägen, in front of the park. There’s a lot to suggest that this is the man who shot Frans Balder. Not that anyone has seen his face clearly; it’s possible he was wearing some sort of mask. But he seems to have moved with the same exceptional efficiency and speed. And in the opposite camp there was this woman.”

“What do we know about her?”

“Not much. She was wearing a black leather jacket, we think, and dark jeans. She was young with black hair and piercings — a punk, according to one witness — also short, but fierce. She appeared out of nowhere, throwing herself over the boy and shielding him. The witnesses all agree that she was not some ordinary member of the public. She seemed to have training, or had at least found herself in similar situations before. Then there’s the car — we have conflicting reports. One witness says it just happened to be driving by, and the woman and the boy threw themselves in more or less while it was moving. Others — especially those guys from the School of Economics — think the car was part of the operation. Either way, we have a kidnapping on our hands.”

“It doesn’t make sense. This woman saved the boy only to abscond with him?” Grane said.

“That’s what it looks like. Otherwise we would have heard from her by now, wouldn’t we?”

“How did she get to Sveavägen?”

“We don’t know yet. But a witness, a former editor-in-chief of a trade-union paper, says the woman looked somehow familiar,” Olofsson said.

He went on to say something else, but by then Grane had stopped listening. She was thinking, Zalachenko’s daughter — it has to be Zalachenko’s daughter , knowing full well how unfair it was to call her that. The daughter had nothing to do with the father. On the contrary, she had hated him.

But Grane had known her by that name ever since, years earlier, she had read everything she could lay her hands on about the Zalachenko affair. While Olofsson went on speculating, she began to feel the pieces were falling into place. Already the day before she had identified some commonalities between Zalachenko’s old network and the group which called itself the Spiders, but had dismissed them. She had believed there was a limit to how far thuggish criminals could develop their skills; it seemed entirely unreasonable to suppose that they could go from seedy-looking biker types in their leather waistcoats to cutting-edge hackers. Yet the thought had occurred to her. Grane had even wondered if the girl who helped Linus Brandell trace the break-in on Balder’s computers might have been Zalachenko’s daughter. There was a Säpo file on the woman, with a note that said “Hacker? Computer savvy?”, and even though it seemed prompted by the surprisingly favourable reference she had received for her work at Milton Security, it was clear from the document that she had devoted a great deal of time to research into her father’s criminal organization.

Most striking of all was that there was a known connection between the woman and Mikael Blomkvist. It was unclear what exactly that connection was; Grane did not for one moment believe the malicious rumours that it was a blackmail situation or something to do with sado-masochistic sex, but the connection was there. Both Blomkvist and the woman — who matched the description of Zalachenko’s daughter — appeared to have known something about the shooting on Sveavägen beforehand, and afterwards Erika Berger had rung to discuss something important. Wasn’t it all pointing in the same direction?