David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

Roger — the name meant nothing to Salander.

A couple of hours later in Fort Meade, once his hacker boys had cleaned up after themselves and shuffled off, Needham walked over to Casales. The odd thing was, he no longer looked at all angry or upset. He was radiant with defiance and carrying a notebook. One of his braces had slipped off his shoulder.

“Hey, bud,” she said. “Tell me, what’s going on?”

“I got some vacation time,” he said. “I’m off to Stockholm.”

“Of all places. Isn’t it cold this time of year?”

“Freezing, by all accounts.”

“So you’re not really going there on vacation.”

“Strictly between us?”

“Go on.”

“Ingram ordered us to halt our investigation. The hacker goes free, and we’re supposed to be satisfied with stopping up a few leaks. Then the whole thing gets swept under the carpet.”

“How the hell can he lay down something like that?”

“They don’t want to awaken any sleeping dogs, he says, and run the risk of anyone finding out about the attack. It would be devastating if it ever got out. Just think of all the malicious glee, and all the people whose heads would roll, starting with yours truly.”

“He threatened you ?”

“Did he ever! Went on about how I would be humiliated publicly, even sued.”

“You don’t seem worried.”

“I’m going to break him.”

“How? Our glamour boy has powerful connections everywhere, you know that.”

“I have a few of my own. Besides, Ingram isn’t the only one with dirt on people. That damn hacker was gracious enough to link and match our computer files and show us some of our own dirty laundry.”

“That’s a bit ironic, isn’t it?”

“It takes a crook to know one. At first the data didn’t look all that spectacular, not compared to the other stuff we’re doing. But when we started to get into it...”

“Yes?”

“It turned out to be dynamite.”

“In what way?”

“Ingram’s closest colleagues not only collect trade secrets to help our own major companies. Sometimes they also sell the information for a lot of money. And that money, Alona, doesn’t always find its way into the coffers of the organization...”

“But into their own pockets.”

“Exactly. I already have enough evidence on that to put two of our top industrial-espionage executives behind bars.”

“Jesus.”

“Unfortunately it’s less straightforward with Ingram. I’m convinced he’s the brains behind the whole thing. Otherwise all of this doesn’t add up. But I don’t have a smoking gun, not yet, which makes the whole operation risky. There’s always a chance — though I wouldn’t bet on it — that the file the hacker downloaded has something specific on him. But it’s impossible to crack — a goddamn R.S.A. encryption.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Tighten the net. Show the world that our very own co-workers are in cahoots with criminal organizations.”

“Like the Spiders.”

“Like the Spiders. And plenty of other bad guys. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were involved in the killing of your professor in Stockholm. They had a clear interest in seeing him dead.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“I’m completely serious. Your professor knew things that could have blown up in their faces.”

“Holy shit. And you’re off to Stockholm like some private detective to investigate it all?”

“Not like a private detective, Alona. I’m going to be official, and while I’m there I’m going to give our hacker such a pummelling she won’t be able to stand.”

“Wait, Ed. Did I hear you say she?”

“You’d better believe it. Our hacker’s a she!”

August’s drawings took Salander back in time. She thought of that fist beating rhythmically and relentlessly on the mattress.

She remembered the thuds and the grunting and the crying from the bedroom next door. She remembered the times at Lundagatan when her comics and fantasies of revenge were her only refuge. But she shook off the memories. She changed the dressing on her shoulder. Then she checked her pistol, made sure that it was loaded. She went onto the P.G.P. link. Andrei Zander was asking how they were, and she gave a short reply.

Outside, the storm was shaking the trees and bushes. She helped herself to some whisky and a piece of chocolate, then went out onto the terrace and from there to the rock slope where she carefully reconnoitred the terrain, noticing a small cleft part way down. She counted her steps and memorized the lie of the land.

By the time she got back, August had made another drawing of Westman and the Roger person. She supposed he needed to get it out of his system. But still he had not drawn anything from the night of the murder. Perhaps the experience was blocked in his mind.

Salander was overcome by a feeling of time running away from them and she cast a worried look at August. For a minute or so she focused on the mind-boggling numbers he had put down on paper next to the new drawing. She studied their structure until suddenly she spotted a sequence which did not fit in with the others.

It was relatively short: 2305843008139952128. She got it immediately. It was not a prime number, it was — and here her spirits lifted — a number which, according to a perfect harmony, is made up of the sum of all its positive divisors. It was, in other words, a perfect number, just as 6 is because it can be divided by 3, 2 and 1 and 3 + 2 + 1 happen to add up to 6. She smiled. And then she had an exhilarating thought.

“Now you’re going to have to explain yourself,” Casales said.

“I will,” Needham said. “But first, even though I trust you, I need you to give me a solemn promise that you won’t say any of this to anybody.”

“I promise, you jerk.”

“Good. Here’s the story: after I yelled at Ingram, mostly for the sake of appearances, I told him he was right. I even pretended to be grateful to him for putting a stop to our investigation. We wouldn’t have gotten any further anyway, I said, and it was partly true. From a purely technical point of view we were out of options. We’d done everything and then some, but it was pointless. The hacker put red herrings all over the place and kept leading us into new mazes and labyrinths. One of my guys said that even if we got to the end, against all odds, we wouldn’t believe we’d made it. We’d just kid ourselves that it was a new trap. We were prepared for just about anything from this hacker, anything but flaws and weaknesses. So if we kept going the usual way we’d had it.”

“You don’t tend to go the usual way.”

“No, I prefer the roundabout way. The truth is, we hadn’t given up at all. We’d been talking to our hacker contacts out there and our friends in the software companies. We did advanced searches, surveillance and our own computer breaches. You see, when an attack is as complex as this one, you can always be sure there’s been some research up front. Certain specific questions have been asked. Certain specific sites have been visited and inevitably some of that becomes known to us. But there was one factor above all that played into our hands, Alona: the hacker’s skill. It was so incredible that it limited the number of suspects. Like a criminal suddenly running a hundred metres in 9.7 seconds at a crime scene — you’d be pretty sure the guy is a certain Mr Bolt or one of his close rivals, right?”