David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

There were rumours that he had been convicted of grievous bodily harm and procuring. He had been married twice — both wives were dead, and Blomkvist had not been able to find a cause of death in either case. But the most interesting discovery he made was that the man had served as a substitute board member of a company — minor and long-since defunct — by the name of Bodin Construction & Export, which had dealt in “sales of construction materials”.

The owner of the company had been Karl Axel Bodin, the alias of Alexander Zalachenko, a name that revived memories of the evil conspiracy which became the subject of Millennium ’s greatest scoop. Zalachenko who was Salander’s father, and her dark shadow, the black heart behind her throbbing determination to exact revenge.

Was it a coincidence that his name had cropped up? Blomkvist knew better than anyone that if you dig deep enough into a story, you will always find links. Life is constantly treating us to illusory connections. It was just that, when it came to Lisbeth Salander, he stopped believing in coincidence.

If she broke a surgeon’s fingers or delved into the theft of some advanced A.I. technology, you could be sure that she had not only thought it through to the last particle, she would also have a reason. Salander was not one to forget an injustice. She retaliated and she righted wrongs. Could her involvement in this story be connected to her own background? It was by no means inconceivable.

Blomkvist looked up from his computer and glanced at Zander. Zander nodded back at him. The faint smell of something cooking was coming from the kitchen. Thudding rock music could be heard from Götgatan. Outside the storm was howling, and the sky was still dark and wild. Blomkvist went into the encrypted link out of habit, not expecting to find anything. But then his face lit up. He even let out a small whoop of joy.

It said:

He wrote:

Then he could not resist adding:

She answered at once:

“O.K.” was an exaggeration. Salander was better, but still in bad shape. For half of yesterday, in her apartment, she had been barely conscious and only managed with the greatest difficulty to drag herself out of bed to see that August had something to eat and drink and make sure he had pencils, crayons and paper. But as she approached him now she could see even from a distance that he had drawn nothing.

There was paper scattered all over the coffee table in front of him, but no drawings. Instead she saw rows of scribbles. More absent-mindedly than out of curiosity she tried to make out what they were — he had written numbers, endless series of numbers, and even if at first they made no sense to her, she was intrigued. Suddenly she gave a whistle.

“Oh my God,” she muttered.

They were staggeringly large numbers which formed a familiar pattern alongside the numbers next to them. As she looked through the papers and came across the simple sequence 641, 647, 653 and 659, there was no longer any doubt: they were sexy prime quadruplets, sexy in the sense that they differed from each other by six.

There were also twin primes, and every other imaginable combination of prime numbers. She could not help but smile. “Awesome.”

But August neither responded nor looked up at her. He just kept kneeling by the coffee table, as if he wanted nothing more than to go on writing his numbers. It occurred to her that she had read something about savants and prime numbers, but she put it out of her mind. She was far too unwell for any kind of advanced thinking. Instead she went into the bathroom and took two more Vibramycin antibiotics which had been lying around in her apartment for years.

She packed her pistol and her computer, a few changes of clothes and to be on the safe side she put on a wig and a pair of dark glasses. When she was ready she asked the boy to get up. He did not respond, just held his pencil in a tight grip. For a moment she stood in front of him, stumped. Then she said sternly, “Get up!” and he did.

They put on their outer layers, took the lift down to the garage and set off for the safe house on Ingarö. Her left shoulder was tightly strapped and it ached, so she steered with her right hand. The top of her chest was hurting, she had a fever and had to stop a couple of times at the side of the road to rest. When finally they got to the beach and the jetty by Stora Barnvik on Ingarö, and followed the directions to climb the wooden steps up the slope to the house, she collapsed exhausted on the first bed she saw. She was shivering and freezing cold.

Soon after, breathing laboriously, she got up and sat at the kitchen table with her laptop, and tried once more to crack the file she had downloaded from the N.S.A. But she did not even come close. August sat next to her, looking stiffly at the pile of paper and crayons Berger had left for him, no longer interested in prime numbers, still less in drawing pictures. Perhaps he was in shock.

The man who called himself Jan Holtser was sitting in a room at the Clarion Hotel Arlanda, talking on the telephone with his daughter. As he had expected, she did not believe him.

“Are you scared of me?” she said. “Are you afraid I’m going to cross-examine you?”

“No, Olga, absolutely not,” he said. “It’s just that...”

He could not find the words. He knew Olga could tell he was hiding something, and ended the conversation sooner than he wanted to. Bogdanov was sitting next to him on the hotel bed, swearing. He had been through Balder’s computer at least a hundred times and found “fuck all”, as he put it. “Not a single fucking thing!”

“I stole a computer with nothing on it,” Holtser said.

“Right.”

“So what was the professor using it for?”

“For something very important, clearly. I can see that a large file, presumably connected to other computers, was deleted recently. But I can’t recover it. He knew his stuff, that guy.”

“Useless,” Holtser said.

“Completely fucking useless.”

“And the Blackphone?”

“There are a couple of calls I haven’t been able to trace, presumably from the Swedish security services or the N.D.R.E. But there’s something bothering me much more.”

“What’s that?”

“A long conversation the professor had just before you stormed in — he was talking to someone at the M.I.R.I., Machine Intelligence Research Institute.”

“What’s the problem with that?”

“The timing — I get the feeling he was having some sort of crisis. Also this institute works to ensure that intelligent computers don’t become a threat to mankind — it doesn’t look good. Balder could have given the M.I.R.I. his research or...”

“Or what?”

“Or he could have spilled the beans on us, at least what he knew.”

“That would be bad.”

Bogdanov nodded and Holtser swore quietly. Nothing had gone as planned and neither of them was used to failing. But here were two major mistakes in a row, and all because of a child, a retarded child.

That was bad enough. But the worst of it was that Kira was on her way, and it sounded like she had lost it. Neither of them was used to that either. On the contrary, they had grown accustomed to her cool elegance, the air of invincibility it gave their operations. Now she was furious, completely off the wall, screaming at them that they were useless, incompetent cretins. It was not so much that those shots might have missed Balder’s son. It was because of the woman who had appeared out of nowhere and rescued the boy. That woman sent Kira around the bend.