David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

Modig noted everything down, realizing that she had to get out a nationwide search bulletin for both the Range Rover and the B.M.W. without delay.

Gabriella Grane was drinking a cappuccino in her kitchen on Villagatan and thinking that she was holding it together, all things considered. But she was probably in shock.

Helena Kraft wanted to see her at 8.00 in the office at Säpo. Grane guessed that she wouldn’t just get the sack. There would be judicial consequences too, which would pretty much ruin her prospects of finding another job. At thirty-three, her career was over.

And that was by no means the worst of it. She had known that she was flouting the law and had taken a conscious risk. But she had done it because she believed it was the best way to protect Frans Balder’s son. Now, after the shoot-out at her summer place, no-one seemed to know where the boy was. He might be injured, or even dead. Grane was racked by the most devastating feelings of guilt: first the father and now the son.

She got up and looked at the clock. It was 7.15 and she needed to get going to give herself time to clean out her desk before the meeting with Kraft. She made up her mind to behave with dignity, to not make any excuses or beg to be allowed to stay. Her Blackphone rang, but she couldn’t be bothered to answer. Instead she put on her boots and her Prada coat and an extravagant red scarf. If she was going under, she might just as well go with a bit of panache. She stood in front of the hall mirror and touched up her make-up, wryly giving herself the victory sign, as Nixon had when he resigned. Then her Blackphone rang again and this time she answered reluctantly. It was Casales at the N.S.A.

“I’ve just heard,” she said.

Of course she had.

“How are you feeling?”

“What do you think?”

“Like the worst person in the whole world?”

“Pretty much.”

“Who’ll never get another job?”

“Spot on, Alona.”

“In that case, let me tell you, you’ve nothing to be ashamed of. You did the right thing.”

“Are you trying to be funny?”

“Doesn’t seem like the moment for jokes, sweetheart. You have a mole on your team.”

Gabriella took a deep breath. “Who is it?”

“Nielsen.”

Gabriella froze. “Do you have proof?”

“Oh yes, I’ll send it all over in a few minutes.”

“Why would Nielsen betray us?”

“I guess he didn’t see it as a betrayal.”

“What on earth did he see it as if not betrayal?”

“Collaborating with Big Brother maybe, doing his duty by the leading nation in the free world? What do I know?”

“So he gave you information.”

“He helped us to help ourselves, actually. He gave us information about your server and your encryption. It’s not as outrageous as it sounds. Let’s face it, we listen in on everything from the neighbours’ gossip to the prime minister’s telephone calls.”

“But this time the information was leaked a stage further.”

“In this case it seeped out like we were a funnel. I know, Gabriella, that you didn’t exactly stick to the rulebook. But I’m absolutely convinced that you were in the right, and I’ll make sure that your superiors get to hear it. You could see that there was something rotten in your organization, so you couldn’t act within it, yet you were determined not to shirk your responsibility.”

“But it went wrong.”

“Sometimes things go wrong, no matter how careful you are.”

“Thanks, Alona, it’s nice of you to say so. But if anything has happened to August Balder, I will never forgive myself.”

“Gabriella, the boy is O.K. He’s cruising around in a car somewhere with Miss Salander, in case someone’s still chasing them.”

Grane could not take it in. “What do you mean?”

“That he’s unhurt, babe, and that thanks to him his father’s murderer has been caught and identified.”

“You’re saying August is alive?”

“That’s right.”

“How do you know?”

“Let’s just say I have a very well-placed source.”

“Alona...”

“Yes?”

“If what you say is true, you’ve given me back my life.”

After hanging up, Grane rang Kraft and insisted that Mårten Nielsen be present at their meeting. Reluctantly, Kraft agreed.

It was 7.30 in the morning when Needham and Blomkvist made their way down the steps from Grane’s summer house to the Audi in the parking area by the beach. Snow lay over the landscape and neither of them said a word. At 5.30 Blomkvist had got a text message from Salander, as brisk and to the point as ever.

Again Salander had not mentioned her own state of health. But it was an incredible relief to hear about the boy. Afterwards Blomkvist had been questioned at length by Modig and Holmberg and he told them every detail of what he and the magazine had been doing over the past few days. They were not friendly or well disposed towards him, yet he got the feeling that somehow they understood. Now, an hour later, he was walking past the jetty. Up the slope a deer scampered into the forest. Blomkvist settled into the driving seat and waited for Needham, who came loping along in his wake. The American’s back was giving him trouble.

On the way to Brunn they found themselves in traffic. For several minutes nothing moved and Blomkvist thought of Zander, who was constantly on his mind. They had still not had any sign of life from him.

“Can you get something noisy on the radio?” Needham said.

Blomkvist tuned into 107.1 and got James Brown belting out what a sex machine he was.

“Give me your phones,” Needham said.

He stacked them next to the speakers at the back of the car. He clearly meant to talk about something sensitive, and Blomkvist had nothing against that — he had to write his story and needed all the facts he could get. But he also knew better than most that there’s no such thing as a leak without an agenda. Although Blomkvist felt a certain affinity with Needham and even appreciated his grumpy charm, he did not trust him for one second.

“Let’s hear it,” he said.

“You could put it this way,” Needham began. “We know that in business and industry there’s always someone taking advantage of inside information.”

“Agreed.”

“For a while we were pretty much spared that in the world of intelligence, for the simple reason that we guarded different kinds of secrets. The dynamite was elsewhere. But since the end of the Cold War, all that has changed. Surveillance in general has become more widespread. These days we control huge amounts of valuable material.”

“And there are people taking advantage of this, you say.”

“Well, that’s basically the whole point of it. Corporate espionage helps keep companies informed about the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. It’s a grey area. Something that was seen as criminal or unethical decades ago is now standard operating procedure. We haven’t been much better at the N.S.A., in fact maybe we’re even...”

“The worst?”

“Just take it easy, let me finish,” Needham said. “I’d say we have a certain moral code. But we’re a large organization with tens of thousands of employees and inevitably there are rotten apples — even one or two very highly placed rotten apples I was thinking of handing you.”

“Out of the kindness of your heart, of course,” Blomkvist said with a touch of sarcasm.