“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.
“O.K., maybe not entirely. But listen. When senior management at our place crosses the line and gets into criminal activities, what do you think happens?”
“Nothing very nice.”
“As you know, there’s a corrupt unit at Solifon, headed up by a man called Zigmund Eckerwald, whose job it is to find out what the competing tech companies are up to. They not only steal the technology but also sell what they steal. That’s bad for Solifon and maybe even for the whole Nasdaq.”
“And for you too.”
“That’s right. It turns out that our two most senior executives in industrial espionage – their names are Jacob Barclay and Brian Abbot – get help from Eckerwald and his gang. In exchange the N.S.A. helps Eckerwald with large-scale communications monitoring. Solifon identifies where the big innovations are happening, and our idiots pluck out the drawings and the technical details.”
“I assume the money this brings in doesn’t always end up in the state coffers.”
“It’s worse than that, buddy. If you do this sort of thing as a state employee, you make yourself very vulnerable, especially because Eckerwald and his gang are also helping major criminals. To be fair, at first they probably didn’t know their clients were major criminals.”
“But that’s what they were?”
“Damn right. And they took advantage too. I could only dream of recruiting hackers at their level of expertise, and the very essence of their business is to exploit information, so you can imagine: once they realized what our guys at the N.S.A. were up to, they knew they were sitting on a goldmine.”
“So they were in a position to blackmail.”
“Talk about having the upper hand. Our guys haven’t just been stealing from large corporations. They’ve also plundered small family businesses and solo entrepreneurs who are struggling to survive. It wouldn’t look too good if everything came out. So as a result the N.S.A. is forced to help not just Eckerwald and Solifon, but also the criminals.”
“You mean the Spiders?”<
br />
“You got it. Maybe for a while everyone stays happy. It’s big business and the money’s rolling in. But then a little genius pops up in the middle of the action, a certain Professor Balder, and he’s just as good at ferreting around as he is at doing everything else. So he finds out about this scheme, or at least part of it. Then of course everyone’s scared shitless and decides that something has to be done. I’m not entirely clear on how these decisions got made. I’m guessing our guys hoped legal threats would be enough. But when you’re in bed with a bunch of criminals … The Spiders prefer violence, so they draw our guys into the plan at a late stage, just to bind them in even more tightly.”
“Jesus.”
“I would never have gotten to know any of this if we hadn’t been hacked,” Needham said.
“Another reason to leave the hacker in peace.”
“Which is exactly what I’m going to do, so long as she tells me how she did it.”
“I don’t know how much your promises are worth, but there’s another thing I’ve been wondering about,” Blomkvist said.
“Shoot.”
“You mentioned two guys, Barclay and Abbot. Are you sure it stops with them? Who’s their boss?”
“I can’t give you his name unfortunately. It’s classified.”
“I suppose I’ll have to live with that.”
“You will,” Needham said inflexibly. At that moment Blomkvist noticed that traffic was starting to flow again.
CHAPTER 28
24.xi, Afternoon
Professor Edelman was standing in the car park at the Karolinska Institute wondering what in heaven’s name he had let himself in for. He was embarking on an arrangement which would mean his having to cancel a whole series of meetings, lectures and conferences.
Even so he felt strangely elated. He had been entranced not just by the boy but also by the young woman who looked as if she had come straight from a street brawl, but who drove a brand new B.M.W. and spoke with chilling authority. He had barely been aware of what he was doing when he said, “Yes, sure, why not?” to her questions, although it was obviously both foolish and rash. The only grain of independence he had shown was to have declined all offers of compensation.
He was going to pay his own travel and hotel expenses, he said. He must have felt guilty. But he was moved to take the boy under his wing, his scientific curiosity was piqued. A savant who both drew with photographic exactitude and could perform prime-number factorization – how absolutely riveting. To his own surprise he even decided to skip the Nobel Prize dinner. The young woman had made him take leave altogether of his senses.
Hanna Balder was sitting in the kitchen on Torsgatan, smoking. It felt as if she had done little else apart from sit there and puff away with a heavy feeling in her stomach. She had been given an unusual amount of support, but she had also been getting an unusual amount of physical abuse. Lasse Westman could not handle her anxiety. It detracted from his own martyrdom.
He was always flying into a rage and yelling, “Can’t you even keep track of your own brat?” Often he lashed out with his fists or threw her across the apartment like a rag doll. Now he would probably go crazy too – she had spilled coffee all over the Dagens Nyheter culture section, and Lasse was already worked up because of a theatre review in it which he had found too sympathetic to actors he did not like.
“What the hell have you done?”
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I’ll wipe it up.”
She could tell from the set of his mouth that that would not satisfy him, he would hit her before he even knew it himself, and she was so well prepared for his slap that she did not say one word or even move her head. She could feel the tears welling up and her heart pounding. But actually that had nothing to do with the blow. That morning she had received a call which was so perplexing that she hardly understood it: August had been found, had disappeared again and was “probably” unharmed – “probably”. It was impossible for Hanna to know if she should be more worried, or less.
The hours had gone by with no further news. Suddenly she got to her feet, no longer caring whether she would get another beating or not. She went into the living room and heard Lasse panting behind her. August’s drawing paper was still lying on the floor and an ambulance was wailing outside. She heard footsteps in the stairwell. Was someone on their way here? The doorbell rang.
“Don’t open. It’ll be some bloody journalist,” Lasse snapped.
Hanna did not want to open either. Still, she could not very well ignore it, could she? Perhaps the police wanted to interview her again, or maybe, maybe they had more information now, good news or bad news.
As she went to the door she thought of Frans. She remembered how he had stood there saying that he had come for August. She remembered his eyes and the fact that he had shaved off his beard, and her own longing for her old life, before Lasse Westman – a time when the telephone rang and the job offers came flooding in, and fear had not yet set its claws into her. She opened the door with the safety chain on and at first she saw nothing; just the lift door, and the reddish-brown walls. Then a shock ran through her, and for a moment she could not believe it. But it really was August! His hair was a tangled mess and his clothes were filthy. He was wearing a pair of trainers much too big for him, and yet: he looked at her with the same serious, impenetrable expression as ever. She would not have expected him to turn up on his own, but when she undid the safety chain she still gave a start. Next to August stood a cool young woman in a leather jacket, with scratch marks on her face and earth in her hair, glaring down at the floor. She had a large suitcase in her hand.
“I’ve come to give you back your son,” she said without looking up.
“Oh my God,” Hanna said. “My God!”
That was all she managed to say, and for a few seconds she was completely at a loss as she stood there in the doorway. Then her shoulders began to shake. She sank to her knees and, forgetting the fact that August hated to be hugged, she threw her arms around him murmuring, “My boy, my boy …” until the tears came. The odd thing was: August not only let her do it, he also seemed on the verge of saying something – as if he had learned to talk on top of everything. But before he had the chance, Lasse was standing behind her.
“What the hell … Well, look who’s here!” he growled, as if he wanted to carry on with their fight.
But then he got a grip on himself. It was an impressive piece of acting, in a way. In the space of a second he began to radiate the presence which used to make women swoon.
“And we get the kid delivered to our front doorstep,” he said to the woman on the landing. “How convenient. Is he O.K.?”
“He’s O.K.,” the woman said in a strange monotone, and without asking walked into the apartment with the suitcase and her muddy boots.
“By all means, just come right on in,” Lasse said in an acid tone.
“I’m here to help you pack, Lasse.”
This was such a strange reply that Hanna was convinced she had misheard, and Lasse did not seem to understand either. He just stood there looking stupid, his mouth wide open.
“What did you say?”
“You’re moving out.”
“Is this some kind of joke?”
“Not at all. You’re leaving this house now, right now, and you’re not coming anywhere near August ever again. You’ve seen him for the last time.”
“You must be off your rocker!”
“Actually I’m being unusually generous. I was planning on throwing you down the stairs there. But I brought a suitcase with me. Thought I’d let you pack some shirts and pants.”
“What kind of a freak are you?” Lasse shouted, both bewildered and beside himself with rage, and he bore down on the woman with the full weight of his hostility, and Hanna wondered if he was going to take a swipe at her as well.
But something stopped him. Maybe it was the woman’s eyes, or possibly the mere fact that she did not react like anyone else would have
done. Instead of backing off or looking frightened she only smiled at him, and took a few crumpled pieces of paper from an inside pocket and handed them to Lasse.
“If ever you and your friend Roger should find yourselves missing August, you can always look at this and remember,” she said.
Lasse turned over the papers, confused. Then he screwed up his face in horror and Hanna took a quick look herself. They were drawings and the top one was of … Lasse. Lasse swinging his fists and looking profoundly evil. Later she would hardly be able to explain it. It was not just that she understood what had been going on when August had been alone at home with Lasse and Roger. She also saw her own life more clearly and soberly than she had for years.
Lasse had looked at her with exactly that twisted, livid face hundreds of times, most recently a minute ago. She knew this was something no-one should have to endure, neither she nor August, and she shrank back. At least she thought she did, because the woman looked at her with a new focus. Hanna eyed her uneasily. They seemed on some level to understand each other.
“Am I right, Hanna, he’s got to go?” the woman said.
The question was potentially lethal, and Hanna looked down at August’s oversize shoes.
“What are those shoes he’s wearing?”
“Mine.”
“Why?”
“We left in a hurry this morning.”
“And what have you been doing?”
“Hiding.”
“I don’t understand …” she began, but got no further.
Lasse grabbed hold of her violently. “Why don’t you tell this psychopath that the only one who’s leaving is her?” he roared.
Hanna cowered, but then … It may have been something to do with the expression on Lasse’s face, or the sense of something implacable in the young woman’s bearing. But then … Hanna heard herself say, “You’re leaving, Lasse! And don’t ever come back!”
The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) Page 39
