David Lagercrantz - The Girl in the Spider's Web

“You’re an idiot, do you know that? A lunatic!” he shouted.

She was too weak to answer. Her strength deserted her completely, and what she had remembered from the drawing now faded from her mind. She sank down on the bench in the changing room next to Jamila Achebe. She used to both box and sleep with Jamila, usually in that order. When they fought their toughest bouts it often seemed like one long, wild foreplay. On a few occasions their behaviour in the shower had not been entirely decent. Neither of them set much store by etiquette.

“I actually agree with that noisy bastard out there. You’re not quite right in the head,” Jamila said.

“Maybe so,” Salander said.

“That wound looks nasty.”

“It’s healing.”

“But you needed to box?”

“Apparently.”

“Shall we go back to my place?”

Salander did not answer. Her mobile was buzzing again in her black bag. Three text messages with the same content from a withheld number. As she read them she balled up her fists and looked lethal. Jamila felt that it might be better to have sex with Salander another day instead.

Blomkvist had woken at 6.00 with some great ideas for the article, and on his way to the office the draft came together in his mind with no effort at all. He worked in deep concentration at the magazine and barely noticed what was going on around him, although sometimes he surfaced with thoughts of Zander.

He refused to give up hope, but he feared that Zander had given his life for the story, and he did what he could to honour his colleague with every sentence he wrote. On one level he intended the report to be a murder story about Frans and August Balder — an account of an eight-year-old autistic boy who sees his father shot, and who despite his disability finds a way of striking back. But on another level Blomkvist wanted it to be an instructive narrative about a new world of surveillance and espionage, where the boundaries between the legal and the criminal have been erased. The words came pouring out, but still it was not without its difficulties.

Through an old police contact he had got hold of the paperwork on the unsolved murder of Kajsa Falk, the girlfriend of one of the leading figures in Svavelsjö M.C. The killer had never been identified and none of the people questioned during the investigation had been willing to contribute anything of value, but Blomkvist nevertheless gathered that a violent rift had torn apart the motorcycle club and that there was an insidious terror among the gang members of a “Lady Zala”, as one of the witnesses put it.

Despite considerable efforts, the police had not managed to discover who or what the name referred to. But there was not the slightest doubt in Blomkvist’s mind that “Lady Zala” was Camilla, and that she was behind a whole series of other crimes, both in Sweden and abroad. But it was not easy to unearth any evidence, and that exasperated him. For the time being he referred to her in the article by her codename, Thanos.

Yet the biggest challenge was not Camilla or her shadowy connections to the Russian Duma. What bothered Blomkvist most was that he knew Needham would never have come all the way to Sweden and leaked top-secret information if he were not bent on hiding something even bigger. Needham was no fool, and he in turn knew that Blomkvist was not stupid either. He had therefore not tried to make any part of his account too pretty.

On the contrary, he painted a fairly dreadful picture of the N.S.A. And yet... a closer inspection of the information told Blomkvist that, all in all, Needham was describing an intelligence agency which both functioned well and behaved reasonably decently, if you ignored the revolting bunch of criminals in the department known as Protection of Strategic Technologies — the self-same department, as it happens, which had prevented Needham from nailing his hacker.

The American must have wanted to do serious harm to a few specific colleagues, but rather than sink the whole of his organization, he preferred to give it a softer landing in an already inevitable crash. So Blomkvist was not especially surprised or angry when Berger appeared behind him and with a worried expression handed him a T.T. telegram.

“Does this scupper our story?” she said.

The telegram read:

Two senior executives at the N.S.A., Jacob Barclay and Brian Abbot, have been arrested on suspicion of serious financial misconduct and are on indefinite leave awaiting trial.

“This is a blot on the reputation of our organization and we have spared no effort in tackling the issues and holding those guilty to account. Anyone working for the N.S.A. must have the highest ethical standards and we undertake to be as transparent during the judicial process as we can, while remaining sensitive to our national security interests,” N.S.A. chief Admiral Charles O’Connor has told A.P.

The telegram did not contain very much apart from the long quote; it said nothing about Balder’s murder and nothing that could be linked to the events in Stockholm. But Blomkvist understood what Berger meant. Now that the news was out, the Washington Post and the New York Times and a whole pack of serious American journalists would descend on the story, and it would be impossible to anticipate what they might dig up.

“Not good,” he said calmly. “But not a surprise.”

“Really?”

“It’s part of the same strategy that led the N.S.A. to seek me out: damage limitation. They want to take back the initiative.”

“How do you mean?”

“There’s a reason why they leaked this to me. I could tell right away that there was something odd about it. Why did Needham insist on coming to talk to me here in Stockholm, and at 5.00 in the morning?”

“So you think that what he’s doing is sanctioned higher up?”

“I suspected it, but at first I didn’t get what he was doing. I just felt that something was wrong. Then I talked to Salander.”

“And that clarified things?”

“I realized that Needham knew exactly what she’d dug up during her hacker attack, and he had every reason to fear that I would learn all about it. He wanted to limit the damage.”

“Even so, he hardly presented you with a rosy picture.”

“He knew I wouldn’t be satisfied with anything too pretty. I suspect he gave me just enough to keep me happy and let me have my scoop, and to prevent me from digging any deeper.”

“He’s in for a disappointment then.”

“Let’s at least hope so. But I can’t see how to break through. The N.S.A. is a closed door.”

“Even for an old bloodhound like Mikael Blomkvist?”

“Even for him.”

The text message had said Salander could not work out if it had been sent three times in error or if it was an absurd attempt to be over-explicit. It made no difference now anyway.

The message was evidently from Camilla, but it added nothing to what Salander already knew. The events on Ingarö had only deepened the ancient hatred — she was certain Camilla would come after her again, having got so close.

It was not the wording of the texts that had upset Salander so much as the thoughts it had brought to mind, the memory of what she had seen on the steep rock slope in the early morning light when she and August had crouched on the narrow ledge in falling snow, gunfire rattling above them. August had not been wearing a jacket or shoes and was shivering violently as the seconds went by and Salander realized how desperately compromised their situation was. She had a child to take care of and a pathetic pistol for a weapon, while the bastards up there had assault rifles. She had to take them by surprise, otherwise she and August would be slaughtered like lambs. She listened to the men’s footsteps and the direction they were shooting in, even their breathing and the rustle of their clothes.