David Lagercrantz: The Girl in the Spider's Web

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Continuing Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy

Copyright

Map of Stockholm

Characters in the Millennium series

Prologue

Part I: The Watchful Eye

Part II: The Labyrinths of Memory

Part III: Asymmetric Problems

Map of Stockholm Archipelago

A Letter to my Readers

Author and Translator Biographies

Author’s Acknowledgements

Also Available

Lisbeth Quotation

LISBETH SALANDER — an exceptionally talented hacker with tattoos, piercings and a troubled past.

MIKAEL BLOMKVIST — an investigating journalist at Millennium magazine. Salander helped him to research one of the biggest stories of his career, about the disappearance of Harriet Vanger. He later helped to clear her of murder and vindicate her in a legal battle over her right to determine her own affairs.

ALEXANDER ZALACHENKO — also known as Zala, or his alias Karl Axel Bodin. A Russian spy who defected to Sweden and was protected for years by a special group within Säpo. He is Lisbeth Salander’s father, and used violently to abuse her mother, Agneta Salander. He was also the head of a criminal empire.

RONALD NIEDERMANN — Salander’s half-brother, a blond giant impervious to pain. Salander arranged for his murder.

CAMILLA SALANDER — Salander’s twin sister, from whom she is estranged.

AGNETA SALANDER — Salander and Camilla’s mother, who died in a nursing home at the age of forty-three.

HOLGER PALMGREN — Salander’s former guardian, a lawyer. One of the few people who knows Salander well and whom she trusts.

DRAGAN ARMANSKY — Salander’s former, now-occasional, employer, the head of Milton Security. Another of the few she trusts.

PETER TELEBORIAN — Salander’s sadistic child psychiatrist. Chief prosecution witness in Salander’s incompetency trial.

IRENE NESSER — a woman whose Norwegian passport has fallen into Salander’s hands, allowing Salander to assume her identity.

HANS-ERIK WENNERSTRÖM — a shadowy magnate who tricks Blomkvist into publishing an unsubstantiated defamatory article about his business, landing Blomkvist in prison. Salander uses her talents to empty his bank accounts in retribution.

ERIKA BERGER — editor in chief of Millennium magazine, occasional lover of Blomkvist.

GREGER BECKMAN — Erika Berger’s husband.

MALIN ERIKSSON — managing editor of Millennium .

CHRISTER MALM — art director and partner at Millennium .

ANNIKA GIANNINI — Blomkvist’s sister, a lawyer who represented Salander in her trial.

HARRIET VANGER — scion of a wealthy industrial family, who disappeared as a girl and was found by Blomkvist and Salander at the behest of her great-uncle, Henrik Vanger. She became a shareholder in Millennium .

SVAVELSJÖ M.C. — a motorcycle gang closely associated with Zalachenko. Members of the gang were seriously injured by Salander.

HACKER REPUBLIC — a coalition of hackers, among whom Salander, who goes by the handle “Wasp”, is the star. Includes Plague, Trinity and Bob the Dog.

SÄPO — the Swedish security police, which harboured a secret faction known as “the Section” dedicated to protecting Zalachenko.

JAN BUBLANSKI — detective inspector with the Stockholm police, who headed the team investigating the Salander case. Now promoted to chief inspector. Known as “Officer Bubble”.

SONJA MODIG — a police officer who works closely with Bublanski.

JERKER HOLMBERG — a police officer who, in Bublanski’s eyes, is perhaps the best crime scene investigator in the Swedish police force.

HANS FASTE — a Stockholm policeman who clashed with Bublanski and leaked information to Prosecutor Ekström during the Salander investigation.

RICHARD EKSTRÖM — the prosecutor who brought the case against Salander, now chief prosecutor. A manipulative and venal man, believed within the police to be interested only in self-advancement.

This story begins with a dream, and not a particularly spectacular one at that. Just a hand beating rhythmically and relentlessly on a mattress in a room on Lundagatan.

Yet it still gets Lisbeth Salander out of her bed in the early light of dawn. Then she sits at her computer and starts the hunt.

The N.S.A., or National Security Agency, is a United States federal authority that reports to the Department of Defense. The head office is in Fort Meade, Maryland, by the Patuxent Freeway.

Since its foundation in 1952, the N.S.A. has been engaged in signals surveillance — these days mostly in connection with Internet and telephone traffic. Time after time its powers have been increased, and now it monitors more than twenty billion conversations and messages every twenty-four hours.

Frans Balder always thought of himself as a lousy father.

He had hardly attempted to shoulder the role of father before and he did not feel comfortable with the task now that his son was eight. But it was his duty, that was how he saw it. The boy was having a rough time living with his ex-wife and her bloody partner, Lasse Westman.

So Balder had given up his job in Silicon Valley, got on a plane home and was now standing at Arlanda airport, almost in shock, waiting for a taxi. The weather was hellish. Rain whipped into his face and for the hundredth time he wondered if he was doing the right thing.

That he of all self-centred idiots should become a full-time father, how crazy an idea was that? He might as well have got a job at the zoo. He knew nothing about children and not much about life in general. The strangest thing of all was nobody had asked him to do it. No mother or grandmother had called him, pleading and telling him to face up to his responsibilities.

It was his own decision. He was proposing to defy a long-standing custody ruling and, without warning, walk into his ex-wife’s place and bring home his boy, August. No doubt all hell would break loose. That bloody Lasse Westman would probably give him a real beating. But he put that out of his mind and got into a taxi with a woman driver who was dementedly chewing gum and at the same time trying to strike up a conversation with him. She would not have succeeded even on one of his better days. Balder was not one for small talk.

He sat there in the back seat thinking about his son and everything that had happened recently. August was not the only — or even the main — reason why he had stopped working at Solifon. His life was in turmoil and for a moment he wondered if he really knew what he was getting himself into. As the taxi came into the Vasastan neighbourhood it felt as if all the blood was draining from his body. But there was no turning back now.

He paid the taxi on Torsgatan and took out his luggage, leaving it just inside the building’s front entrance. The only thing he took with him up the stairs was an empty suitcase covered with a brightly coloured map of the world, which he had bought at San Francisco International. He stood outside the apartment door, panting. With his eyes closed he imagined all the possible scenarios of fighting and screaming, and actually, he thought, you could hardly blame them. Nobody just turns up and snatches a child from his home, least of all a father whose only previous involvement has consisted of depositing money into a bank account. But this was an emergency, so he steeled himself and rang the doorbell, fighting off the urge to run away.