David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

“A meeting with a senior civil servant who’s on his way to Sweden. He wants to see you as early as possible tomorrow morning at the Grand Hôtel.”

Blomkvist made an apologetic gesture in Fru Dahlgren’s direction.

“I have a tight schedule,” he said, “So if I’m to meet anybody, at the very least I want a name and an explanation.”

“The man’s name is Edwin Needham, and it’s about someone using the handle Wasp, who is suspected of serious crimes.”

Blomkvist felt a wave of panic. “O.K.,” he said. “What time?”

“Five o’clock tomorrow morning would work.”

“You’ve got to be joking!”

“Regrettably there’s nothing to joke about in all this. I suggest that you’re punctual. Mr Needham will see you in his room. You’ll have to leave your mobile at reception, and you’ll be searched.”

Blomkvist got to his feet and took his leave of Margareta Dahlgren.

Sometimes it is easier to put together than to put asunder.

Nowadays computers can easily multiply prime numbers with millions of digits. Yet it is extremely complicated to reverse the process. Numbers with only a few hundred digits present huge problems.

Encryption algorithms like R.S.A. take advantage of the difficulties involved in prime-number factorization. Prime numbers have become secrecy’s best friends.

It had not taken long for Salander to identify the Roger whom August had been drawing. She had seen a younger version of the man on a website showing former actors from Revolutionsteatern in Vasastan. He was called Roger Winter. He had had a couple of major film roles at the beginning of his career, but lately had fetched up in a backwater, and was now less well known than his wheelchair-bound brother Tobias, an outspoken professor of biology who was said these days to have distanced himself altogether from Roger.

Salander wrote down Roger Winter’s address and then hacked into the supercomputer N.S.F. M.R.I. She also opened the program with which she was trying to construct a dynamic system for finding the elliptic curves which were most likely to do the job, and with as few iterations as possible. But whatever she tried, she was unable to get any closer to a solution. The N.S.A. file remained impenetrable. In the end she went and looked in on August. She swore. The boy was awake, sitting up in bed writing something on a piece of paper, and as she came closer she could see that he was doing more prime-number factorizations.

“It’s no good. It’s not getting us anywhere,” she muttered, and when August began to rock to and fro hysterically once again she told him to pull himself together and go back to sleep.

It was late and she decided that she too should rest for a while. She took the bed next to his, but it was impossible to sleep. August tossed and turned and whimpered, and in the end Salander decided to say something, to try to settle him. The best she could think of was, “Do you know about elliptic curves?”

Of course she got no answer. That did not deter her from giving as simple and clear an explanation as she could.

“Do you get it?” she said.

August did not reply.

“O.K., then,” she went on. “Take the number 3,034,267, for example. I know you can easily find its prime-number factors. But it can also be done using elliptic curves. Let’s for example take curve y = x 3— x + 4 and point P = (1.2) on that curve.”

She wrote the equation on a piece of paper on the bedside table. But August did not seem to be following at all. She thought about those autistic twins she had read up on. They had some mysterious way of identifying large prime numbers, yet could not solve the simplest equations. Perhaps August was like that too. Perhaps he was more of a calculating machine than a genuine mathematical talent, and in any case it didn’t matter right now. Her bullet wound was aching again and she needed some sleep. She needed to drive out all her old childhood demons which had come to life again because of the boy.

It was past midnight by the time Blomkvist got home and, even though he was exhausted and had to get up at the crack of dawn, he sat down at his computer and Googled Edwin Needham. There were quite a few Edwin Needhams in the world, including a successful rugby player who had made an extraordinary comeback having had leukaemia.

There was one Edwin Needham who seemed to be an expert on water purification, and another who was good at getting himself into society photographs and looking daft. But none of them seemed right for someone who could have been involved in cracking Wasp’s identity and accusing her of criminal activity. There was an Edwin Needham who was a computer engineer with a Ph.D. from M.I.T., and that was at least the right line of business, but not even he seemed to fit. He was now a senior executive at Safeline, a leading business in computer virus protection, and that company would certainly have an interest in hackers. But the statements made by this Ed, as he was known, were all about market share and new products. Nothing he said rated higher than the usual clichéd sales talk, not even when he got the chance to talk about his leisure pursuits: bowling and fly fishing. He loved nature, he said, he loved the competitive aspect... The most threatening thing he seemed capable of doing was boring people to death.

There was a picture of him, grinning and bare-chested, holding up a large salmon, the sort of snap which are a dime a dozen in fishing circles. It was as dull as everything else, and yet gradually Blomkvist began to wonder whether the dullness might not be the whole point. He read through the material again and this time it struck him as something concocted, a facade. Slowly but surely he came to the opposite conclusion: this was the man. You could smell the intelligence services a mile off, couldn’t you? It felt like N.S.A. or C.I.A. Once again he looked at the photograph with the salmon, and this time he thought he saw something very different.

He saw a tough guy putting on an act. There was something unwavering about the way he stood and his mocking grin into the camera, at least that is what Blomkvist imagined, and again he thought of Salander. He wondered if he ought to tell her about this meeting. But there was no reason to worry her now, especially since he did not actually know anything, so instead he decided to go to bed. He needed to sleep for a few hours and have a clear head when he met Needham in the morning. As he slowly brushed his teeth and undressed and climbed into bed, he realized he was more tired than he could have imagined and fell asleep in no time. He dreamed that he was being dragged under and almost drowned in the river Needham had been standing in. Afterwards he had a vague image of himself crawling along the riverbed surrounded by flopping, thrashing salmon. But he cannot have slept for long. He woke with a start and the growing conviction that he had overlooked something. His mobile was lying on the bedside table and his thoughts turned to Zander. The young man must have been on his mind all along.

Linda had double-locked the door. There was nothing odd about that — a woman in her situation had to take all possible precautions. It still made Zander feel uncomfortable, but he put that down to the apartment, or so he tried to convince himself. It was not at all what he had been expecting. Could this really be the home of one of her girlfriends?