David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

“That doesn’t necessarily mean it was Wasp who hacked you.”

“Of course not. But we took a closer look at this girl, and what can I say? She has an interesting background, doesn’t she? A lot of information about her in the public record has been mysteriously deleted, but we still found more than enough and... I don’t know, I may be wrong, but I get the feeling we’re on the right track. Mikael, you don’t know shit about me. But I know what it’s like for a kid to see extreme violence at close quarters. And I know what it’s like when society doesn’t lift a finger to punish the guilty party. It hurts like hell, and I’m not at all surprised that most children who experience it go under. They turn into destructive bastards themselves.”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

“But just a few grow to be as strong as bears, Mikael, and they stand up and fight back. Wasp was one of those, wasn’t she?”

Blomkvist nodded pensively and pressed down on the accelerator a little more.

“They locked her up and kept trying to break her. But she kept coming back, and do you know what I think?”

“No.”

“She got stronger each time. She became positively lethal. She hasn’t forgotten a single thing that happened. It’s all etched into her, isn’t it? And maybe that’s at the bottom of this whole goddamn mess.”

“What is it you want?” Blomkvist said bluntly.

“I want what Wasp wants. I want to set some things right.”

“Plus get your hands on the hacker.”

“I want to meet her and give her a piece of my mind and plug every last damn hole in our security. But above all I want to get my own back on certain people who wouldn’t let me finish my job because Wasp exposed them. I have reason to believe you’re going to help me with that.”

“Why so?”

“Because you’re a fine reporter. Fine reporters don’t want dirty secrets to go on being dirty secrets.”

“And Wasp?”

“Wasp is going to get a chance to do her worst. You’re going to help me with that too.”

“Or else?”

“Or else I’ll find a way of putting her inside, and making her life hell again, I swear.”

“But for now all you want to do is talk to her?”

“No fucker is going to be allowed to hack into my system again, so I need to understand exactly how she did it. I want you to give her that message. I’m prepared to let your girlfriend go free if she’ll sit down with me and explain.”

“I’ll tell her. Let’s just hope...”

“That she’s still alive,” Needham said. They turned left at high speed in the direction of Ingaröstrand.

It was rare for Holtser to get things so wrong.

He had this romantic delusion that you could tell from a distance if a man was likely to succeed in close combat. That was why he had not been surprised when Kira’s attempted seduction of Blomkvist had failed. Orlov and Bogdanov had been completely confident. But Holtser had had his doubts even though he had only seen the journalist for one giddy second in Saltsjöbaden. Blomkvist looked like a problem. He looked like a man who could not be fooled or broken so easily.

With the younger journalist it was different. He looked like the archetypal weakling, yet nothing could have been further from the truth. Zander had resisted for longer than anyone Holtser had ever tortured. Despite excruciating pain he had refused to break. His eyes shone with a grim determination which seemed buttressed by a higher principle, and at one point Holtser thought they would have to give up, that Zander would rather endure any suffering than talk. It was not until Kira solemnly promised that both Berger and Blomkvist from Millennium would be made to suffer as well that Zander finally caved in.

By then it was 3.30 in the morning. Holtser knew that he would always remember the moment. Snow was falling on the skylights. The young man’s face was dried out and hollow-eyed. Blood had splashed up from his chest and flecked his mouth and cheeks. His lips, which for a long time had been covered with tape, were split and oozing. He was a wreck, but still you could tell that he was a beautiful young man.

Holtser thought of Olga — how would she have felt about him? Wasn’t this journalist just the kind of educated man she liked, someone who fights injustice, takes the side of beggars and outcasts? He thought about that, and about other things in his own life. After that he made the sign of the cross, the Russian cross, where one way leads to heaven and the other to hell, and then he glanced over at Kira. She was lovelier than ever.

Her eyes burned with light. She was sitting on a stool by the bed wearing an elegant blue dress — which had largely escaped the bloodstains — and said something in Swedish to Zander, something which sounded soft and tender. Then she took him by the hand. He gripped hers in return. He had nowhere else to turn for comfort. The wind howled outside in the alley. Kira nodded and smiled at Holtser. Snowflakes fell on the window ledge.

Afterwards they were sitting together in a Land Rover on the way out to Ingarö. Holtser felt empty, and was not happy with the way things were going. But there was no getting away from the fact that his own mistake had led them there, so he sat quietly, listening to Kira. She was strangely excited and spoke with searing hatred of the woman they were about to confront. Holtser did not think it was a good sign, and if he could have brought himself to do so he would have urged her to turn back and get the hell out of the country.

But he said nothing as the snow fell and they drove on in the darkness. Kira’s sparkling, cold eyes frightened him, but he pushed away the thought. He had to give her credit at least — she had been amazingly quick to put two and two together.

Not only had she worked out who had hurtled in to save the boy on Sveavägen. She had also guessed who would know where the boy and the woman had disappeared to, and the person she came up with was none other than Mikael Blomkvist. They were baffled by her reasoning. Why would a reputable Swedish journalist harbour a person who appeared from nowhere and abducted a child from a crime scene? But the more they examined the theory, the more it held together. Not only did the woman — whose name was Lisbeth Salander — have close ties to the reporter, but something also happened at the Millennium offices.

After the murder in Saltsjöbaden, Bogdanov had hacked into Blomkvist’s computer to try to find out why Balder had summoned him to his home in the middle of the night. Getting access to his email had been easy enough. But that had now stopped. When was the last time it had been impossible for Bogdanov to read someone’s emails? Never, so far as Holtser was aware. Blomkvist had suddenly become much more careful — right after the woman and the boy disappeared from Sveavägen.

That in itself was no guarantee that the journalist knew where they now were. But as time went on there were more indications that the theory might be right, and in any case Kira did not seem to need cast-iron evidence. She wanted to go for Blomkvist. Or, if not him, then someone else at the magazine. More than anything she was obsessive in her determination to track down the woman and the child.

Maybe Holtser could not understand the subtleties of Kira’s motives. But it was for his benefit that they were going to do away with the boy. Kira chose to take significant risks for Holtser, and he was grateful, he really was, even though now in the car he felt uneasy.