David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

Salander considered killing him. Instead she kicked him hard in the throat and stomach and threw away his weapon. Then she ran across the terrace with August and down towards the steep rocky slope. But suddenly she thought of the drawing. She had not seen how far the boy had got with it. Should she go back? No, the others would be here any moment. They had to get away. But still... the drawing was also a weapon, and the cause of all this madness. She left August with her computer on the rock ledge she had identified the night before. She then launched herself back up the slope and into the house and looked on the table. At first she could not see it. Drawings of that bastard Westman were everywhere, and rows of prime numbers.

But there — there it was, and above the chess squares and the mirrors there was now a pale figure with a sharply defined scar on his forehead, which Salander by now recognized only too well. It was the same man who was lying on the floor in front of her, moaning. She whipped out her mobile, took a photograph and sent it to Bublanski and Modig. She had even scribbled a line at the top of the paper. But a second later she realized that was a mistake.

They were surrounded.

Salander had sent the same word to his Samsung as she had to Berger: . It hardly left room for misunderstanding, not coming from Salander. However Blomkvist looked at it, it could only mean that she and August had been discovered, and at worst they were under attack even now. He floored the accelerator as he passed Stadsgårdskajen and emerged onto the Värmdö road.

He was driving a brand-new Audi A8, with Needham sitting next to him. Needham looked grim, and every now and then tapped something into his mobile. Blomkvist was not sure why he had allowed him to come along — maybe he wanted to discover what the man had on Salander, or no, there was something else as well. Maybe Needham could even be useful. In any case he could hardly make the situation any worse. The police had by now been alerted, but he doubted they would able to assemble a unit quickly enough — especially as they were sceptical about the lack of information. Berger had been the focal point, trying to keep them all in contact with each other, and she was the only one who knew the way. He needed all the help he could get.

He was approaching Danviksbron. Needham said something, he did not hear what. His thoughts were elsewhere. He thought of Zander — what had they done to him? Why the hell had he not come out for a beer? Blomkvist tried his number again. He tried calling Salander too. But nobody answered.

“Do you want me to tell you what we have on your hacker?” Needham said.

“Yes... why not?”

But they did not get anywhere this time either. Blomkvist’s mobile rang. Bublanski.

“I hope you realize that you and I are going to have a lot to talk about later, and you can count on there being legal consequences.”

“I hear you.”

“But for now I’m calling to give you some information. We know that Lisbeth Salander was alive at 4.22. Was that before or after she texted you?”

“Before, it must have been before.”

“O.K.”

“How can you be so specific about the time?”

“She sent us something extremely interesting. A drawing. I have to say, Mikael, it exceeded our hopes.”

“So she got the boy to draw.”

“Oh yes. I have no idea what technical issues might arise in terms of admissibility of evidence, if any, or what objections a clever defence lawyer might raise. But as far as I’m concerned there’s no doubt this is the murderer. It’s incredibly vivid, with that extraordinary mathematical precision again. In fact there’s also an equation written at the bottom of the page, I have no idea if it’s relevant to the case. But I sent the drawing to Interpol. If the man is anywhere in their database, he’s toast.”

“Are you going to send it to the press as well?”

“We’re debating that.”

“When will you be at the scene?”

“As soon as possible... hold on a second!”

Blomkvist could hear another telephone ringing in the background, and for a minute or so Bublanski was gone on another call. When he returned, he said briefly:

“We’ve had reports of gunfire out there. It doesn’t sound good.”

Blomkvist took a deep breath. “Any news on Andrei?” he said.

“We’ve traced his mobile signal to a base station in Gamla Stan, but no further. We’ve had no signal at all for a while now, as if the mobile has been smashed or just stopped working.”

Blomkvist drove even faster; fortunately the roads were empty at that hour. At first he said very little to Needham, just a brief account of what was going on, but in the end he could not hold back. He needed something else to think about.

“So what is it you think you’ve found out?”

“About Wasp? For a long time, zip. We were convinced that we’d reached the end of the line,” Needham said. “We’d left no stone unturned, and still got nowhere. In a way it made sense.”

“How so?”

“A hacker capable of a breach like that should also be able to cover all tracks. I realized pretty soon we wouldn’t get anywhere by conventional means. So I skipped all the forensic bullshit and went straight for the big question: who had the chops to pull this off? That question was our best hope. There’s hardly anyone out there with that level of ability. In that sense, you could say that the hacker’s skill worked against them. Plus, we had analysed the rootkit itself, and that...” Needham looked down at his mobile.

“Yes?”

“It had artistic qualities. Personal style, you might say. Now we just had to find its author, and so we started to send posts to the hacker community, and very soon there was one name, one handle, which came up time after time. Can you guess which one?”

“Maybe.”

“It was Wasp. Sure, there were other names, but Wasp stood out. I ended up hearing so much mythical bullshit about this person that I was dying to crack their identity, and we went right back in time. We read every word Wasp had written online, studied every operation that had Wasp’s signature on it. Soon we were certain that Wasp was a woman, and we guessed that she was Swedish. Several of the early posts were written in Swedish, which isn’t much to go on. But since there was a Swedish connection in the organization she was tracking, and Frans Balder was Swedish, it was at least a good place to start. I got in touch with the N.D.R.E., and they searched their records, and then in fact...”

“What?”

“They had a breakthrough. Many years earlier they’d investigated a hacker operation that used that very handle, Wasp. It was so long ago that Wasp wasn’t yet even particularly good at encryption.”

“What happened?”

“Wasp had been looking for data on individuals who’d defected from other countries’ intelligence services, and that was enough to trigger the N.D.R.E.’s warning system. Their investigation led them to a psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala, to a computer belonging to the head physician there, a man named Teleborian. Apparently he’d done some work for the Swedish Security Police, so he was above suspicion. Instead the N.D.R.E. concentrated on some mental-health nurses who were targeted because they were... well, to be blunt about it, immigrants. It was such a stupid, blinkered strategy. Anyway, nothing came of it.”

“I can imagine.”

“So I asked a guy at the N.D.R.E. to send over all the old material, and we sifted through it with a completely different mindset. You know, you don’t have to be big and fat and shave in the mornings to be a good hacker. I’ve met twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who are crazy good. It was obvious to me that we should look at every child in the clinic at the time. I had three of my guys investigate each one of them, inside and out, and do you know what we found? One of the children was the daughter of former spy and arch-villain Zalachenko, who was known to our colleagues at the C.I.A., and then everything got really interesting. As you probably know, there are some overlaps between the network the hacker was investigating and Zalachenko’s old crime syndicate.”