David Lagercrantz: The Girl in the Spider's Web

Needham was not just amazingly gifted. There was an obsessive streak to his character, a manic precision and a furious efficiency which boded well for a man in charge of building I.T. security at America’s most highly classified agency. Nobody was damn well going to crack his system. It was a matter of personal pride for him. At Fort Meade he quickly made himself indispensable, to the point where people were constantly lining up to consult him. Not a few were terrified of him and he was often verbally abusive. He had even told the head of the N.S.A. himself, the legendary Admiral Charles O’Connor, to go to hell.

“Use your own busy fucking head for things you might just be able to comprehend,” Needham had roared when the admiral attempted to comment on his work.

But O’Connor and everyone else let it happen. They knew that Needham screamed and yelled for the right reasons — because colleagues had been careless about security regulations, or because they were talking about things beyond their understanding. Not once did he interfere in the rest of the agency’s work, even though his level of clearance gave him access to pretty much everything, and even though in recent years the agency had found itself at the centre of a heated storm of opinion with advocates of both the right and the left seeing the N.S.A. as the devil incarnate, as Orwell’s Big Brother. As far as Needham was concerned, the organization could do whatever the hell it wanted, so long as his security systems remained rigorous and intact. And since he did not yet have a family he more or less lived at the office.

Apart from the occasional drinking session, during which he sometimes turned alarmingly sentimental about his past, there was no suggestion that he had ever told outsiders what he was working on. In that other world he remained as silent as the grave and, if ever questioned about his profession, he stuck to a well-rehearsed cover story.

It was not by chance, nor was it the result of intrigue or manipulation, that he had risen through the ranks and become the N.S.A.’s most senior security chief. Needham and his team had tightened internal surveillance “so that no new whistle-blowers can pop up and punch us on the nose” and during countless sleepless nights created something he alternately called “an unbreakable wall” or “a ferocious little bloodhound”.

“No fucker can get in, and no fucker can dig around in there without permission,” he said. And he was enormously proud of that.

He had been proud, that is, until that disastrous morning in November. The day had begun beautiful and clear. Needham, who had put on quite a belly over the years, came waddling over from the coffee machine in his characteristic way. Because of his seniority he completely ignored dress codes. He was wearing jeans and a red-checked lumberjack shirt, not quite buttoned at the waist, and he sighed as he settled down at his computer. He was not feeling great. His back and right knee hurt and he cursed the fact that his long-time colleague, Alona Casales, had managed to persuade him to come out for a run the night before. Sheer sadism on her part.

Luckily there was nothing super-urgent to deal with. He only had to send an internal memo with some new procedures for those in charge of C.O.S.T., a programme for cooperation with the large I.T. companies — he had even changed the codenames. But he did not get far. He was just beginning to write, in his usual turgid prose:

when he was interrupted by one of his alerts.

He was not particularly worried. His warning systems were so sensitive that they reacted to the slightest divergence in the information flow. It was going to be an anomaly, a notification perhaps that someone was trying to exceed the limits of their authorization, or some minor interference.

As it turned out, he never had time to investigate. In the next moment something so uncanny happened that for several seconds he refused to believe it. He just sat there, staring at the screen. Yet he knew exactly what was going on. A R.A.T. had got into the NSANet intranet. Anywhere else he would have thought: Those fuckers, I’ll crush them . But in here, the most tightly closed and controlled place of all, which he and his team had gone over with a fine-toothed comb a million times just this last year to detect every minuscule little vulnerability, here, no, no, it was impossible — it could not be happening.

Without realizing it he had closed his eyes, as if hoping that it would all vanish so long as he wasn’t watching. But when he looked at the screen again, the sentence he had begun was being completed. His was continuing on its own with the words

“Jesus, Jesus,” he muttered — which was at least a sign that he was beginning to recover some of his composure.

But then the text went on: at which point he gave a loud cry. The word “Root” brought down his whole world. For about a minute, as the computer raced through the most confidential parts of the system at lightning speed, he genuinely believed that he was going to have a heart attack. He was only vaguely aware that people were beginning to gather around his desk.

There was not much of a crowd down at the Bishops Arms. The weather was not encouraging people to venture out, not even to the local pub. Blomkvist was nevertheless met by shouts and laughter, and by a hoarse voice bawling:

“Kalle Blomkvist!”

It came from a man with a puffy red face, a halo of frizzy hair and a fussy moustache, whom Blomkvist had seen many times in the area. He thought his name was Arne, and Arne would turn up at the pub as regularly as clockwork at 2.00 every afternoon. Today he had clearly come earlier than that and settled down at a table to the left of the bar with three drinking companions.

“Mikael Blomkvist,” Blomkvist corrected him with a smile.

Arne and his friends laughed as if Blomkvist’s actual name was the biggest joke of all.

“Got any good scoops?” Arne said.

“I’m thinking about blowing wide open the whole murky scene at the Bishops Arms.”

“You reckon Sweden’s ready for a story like that?”

“No, probably not.”

In truth Blomkvist quite liked this crowd, not that he ever talked to them more than in throw-away lines and banter. But these men were a part of the local scene which made him feel at home in the area, and he was not in the least bit offended when one of them shot out, “I’ve heard that you’re washed up.”

Far from upsetting him, it brought the whole campaign against him down to the low, almost farcical level where it belonged.

“I’ve been washed up for the last fifteen years, hello to you brother bottle, all good things must pass,” he said, quoting the poet Fröding and looking around for someone who might have had the gall to order a tired journalist down to the pub. Since he saw no-one apart from Arne and his gang he went up to Amir at the bar.

Amir was big and fat and jolly, a hard-working father of four who had been running the pub for some years. He and Blomkvist had become good friends. Not because Blomkvist was an especially regular customer, but because they had helped each other out in completely different ways; once or twice when Blomkvist had not had the time to get to the state liquor store and was expecting female company, Amir had supplied him with a couple of bottles of red wine, and Blomkvist in turn had helped a friend of Amir’s, who had no papers, to write letters to the authorities.

“To what do we owe this honour?” Amir said.

“I’m meeting someone.”

“Anyone exciting?”

“I don’t think so. How’s Sara?”

Sara was Amir’s wife and had just had a hip operation.