That would give him something to think about.
She was still sitting there thinking when she noticed that Blomkvist had booted up his computer. His reply came shortly after he read her message:
Lisbeth,
You damn troublesome person. Who the hell is Zala? Is he the link? Do you know who murdered Dag & Mia? If so, tell me so we can solve this mess and go to sleep. Mikael.
OK. Time to hook him.
She created another document and called it [Kalle Blomkvist]. She knew that would upset him. Then she wrote a brief message:
You’re the journalist. Find out.
As expected, he replied at once with an appeal for her to listen to reason, and he tried to play on her feelings. She smiled and closed her connection to his hard drive.
***
Now that she had started snooping around, she moved on and opened Armansky’s hard drive. She read the report about herself that he had written the day after Easter. It was not clear to whom the report was addressed, but she assumed that the only reasonable explanation was that Armansky was working with the police to help bring her in.
She spent a while going through Armansky’s email, but found nothing of interest. Just as she was about to disconnect, she lit upon a message to the technical chief at Milton Security with instructions for the installation of a hidden surveillance camera in his office.
Bingo.
She looked at the date and saw that the message was sent about an hour after her social call in February.
That meant she would have to adjust certain routines in the automatic surveillance system before she paid another visit to Armansky’s office.
CHAPTER 22
Tuesday, March 29 – Sunday, April 3
On Tuesday morning Salander accessed the police criminal register and looked up Alexander Zalachenko. He was not listed, which was not surprising, since as far as she knew he had never been convicted of a crime in Sweden and was not even in the national database.
When she had accessed the criminal register she used the identity of Superintendent Douglas Skiöld of the Malmö police. She got a mild shock when her computer suddenly pinged and an icon in the menu toolbar started blinking to signal that someone was looking for her in the ICQ chat programme.
Her first impulse was to pull the plug and shut down. Then she thought about it. Skiöld had not had the ICQ programme on his machine. Very few older people did.
Which meant that someone was looking for her. And there were not many alternatives to choose from. She clicked on ICQ and typed the words:
– What is it, Plague?
– You are hard to find, Wasp. Ever read your emails?
– How did you find me?
– By Skiöld. I have the same list. I thought you chose the user with the widest access rights.
– What do you want?
– Who is that Zalachenko you were looking for?
– MYOB.
– ...?
– Mind Your Own Business.
– What's happening?
– Fuck off, Plague!
– I thought that it was me, as you say, had problems of social adaptation. But according to the newspapers compared to you I am normality personified.
– I
– Another finger for you. Need help?[4]
Salander hesitated. First Blomkvist and now Plague. Was there no end to all the people coming to her rescue? The problem with Plague was that he was a 350-pound recluse who communicated almost exclusively via the Internet and made Salander look like a miracle of social skills. When she didn’t answer, Plague typed another line:
– Are you still there? Need help getting out of the country?
– No.
– Why did you shoot?
– Piss off.
– Do you think killing more people? And if so, should I worry? Surely I am the only person who can trace you.
– Mind your own business, do not have to worry about.
– I do not worry. Find me on hotmail if you need anything. Guns? Passport again?
– You're a sociopath.
– Look who's talking.[5]
Lisbeth disconnected from ICQ and sat down on the sofa to think. Ten minutes later she sent an email to Plague’s hotmail address.
Prosecutor Richard Ekström, leader of the preliminary investigation, lives in Täby. He’s married with two children and has a broadband connection to his house. I need access to his laptop or home computer. I need to read him in real time. Hostile takeover with mirrored hard drive.
She knew that Plague himself seldom left his apartment in Sundbyberg, so she hoped he had cultivated some pimply teenager to do the field work. There was no need to sign the message. She got an answer fifteen minutes later.
– How much are you paying?
– 10,000 to your account + expenses and 5,000 to your assistant.
– I’ll be in touch.
On Thursday morning she had one email from Plague containing an FTP address. Salander was amazed. She had not expected a result for at least two weeks. Doing a hostile takeover, even with Plague’s brilliant programme and his specially designed hardware, was a laborious process that required slipping bits of information into a computer one kilobyte at a time until a simple piece of software had been created. How rapidly it could be done depended on how often Ekström used his computer, and then it should normally take another few days to transfer all the data to a mirrored hard drive. Forty-eight hours was not merely exceptional, it was theoretically impossible. Salander was impressed. She pinged his ICQ:
– How did you manage it?
– Four family members have computers. You will not believe – they have no firewall! Zero safety. I had only to get hooked to the cable and load. My expenditure was 6000 kronor. Can you afford this much?
– Yes. Plus a bonus for urgency.[6]
She thought for a moment and then transferred 30,000 kronor to Plague’s account via the Internet. She did not want to frighten him off with excessive amounts. Then she made herself comfortable on her Verksam IKEA chair and opened Ekström’s laptop.
Within an hour she had read all the reports that Inspector Bublanski had sent to Ekström. Salander suspected that, technically, reports like these were not allowed to leave police headquarters. It proved once again the theory that no security system is a match for a stupid employee. Through Ekström’s computer she gleaned several important pieces of information.
First, she discovered that Armansky had assigned two of his staff to join Bublanski’s investigative team without remuneration, which in practice meant that Milton Security was sponsoring the police hunt for her. Their assignment was to assist in the arrest of Salander by all possible means. Thanks a lot, Armansky. I’ll remember that. She frowned when she discovered which employees they were. Bohman she had taken for a straight arrow, and he had been perfectly decent in his behaviour towards her. Hedström was a corrupt nobody who had exploited his position at Milton Security to swindle one of the company’s clients.
Salander had a selective morality. She had nothing at all against swindling the company’s clients herself – provided they deserved it – but if she had accepted a job with a confidentiality agreement in it, she would never have broken it.
Salander soon discovered that the person who had leaked the information to the media was Ekström himself. This was evident from an email in which he answered follow-up questions about both Salander’s psychiatric report and the connection between her and Miriam Wu.
The third significant piece of information was the insight that Bublanski’s team did not have a single lead as to where they should look for Salander. She read with interest a report on what measures had been taken and which addresses had been put under sporadic surveillance. It was a short list. Lundagatan, obviously, but also Blomkvist’s address, Miriam’s old address at St.Eriksplan, and Kvarnen, where they had been seen together. Fuck, why did I have to involve Mimmi? What a mistake that was.
On Friday E
kström’s researchers had also found the link to Evil Fingers. She guessed that would mean more addresses being visited. She frowned. So the girls in the group would vanish from her circle of friends too, even though she had had no contact with them since her return to Sweden.
The more she thought about all this, the more confused she became. Ekström was leaking all kinds of bullshit to the media. His objective was clear. He was building publicity and doing the groundwork for the day when he would issue a charge against her.
But why hadn’t he leaked the police report from 1991, which had led her to be locked up at St.Stefan’s? Why keep that story hidden?
She went into Ekström’s computer again and pored over his documents. When she was finished she lit a cigarette. She had not found a single reference to the events of 1991 on his computer. It was strange, but the only explanation was that he didn’t know about the police report.
For a moment she was at a loss. Then she glanced at her PowerBook. This was precisely the kind of thing that Kalle Fucking Blomkvist could sink his teeth into. She rebooted her computer to access his hard drive and created the document [MB2].
Prosecutor E. is leaking information to the media. Ask him why he didn’t leak the old police report.
That should be enough to get him going. She sat patiently and waited two hours for Blomkvist to get online. He read his email and it took fifteen minutes before he noticed her document and another five minutes before he replied with the document [Cryptic]. He didn’t bite. Instead he insisted that he wanted to know who murdered his friends.
That was an argument that Salander could understand. She softened a bit and answered with [Cryptic 2].
What would you do if it was me?
Which was intended as a personal question. He replied with [Cryptic 3]. It shook her.
Lisbeth, if it’s true that you’ve really gone over the edge, then maybe you can ask Peter Teleborian to help you. But I don’t believe you murdered Dag and Mia. I hope and pray that I’m right.
Dag and Mia were going to publish their exposés of the sex trade. My theory is that could have been the reason for the murders. But I have nothing to go on.
I don’t know what went wrong between us, but you and I discussed friendship once. I said that friendship is built on two things – respect and trust. Even if you don’t like me, you can still depend on me and trust me. I’ve never shared your secrets with anyone. Not even what happened to Wennerström’s billions. Trust me. I’m not your enemy. M.
Blomkvist’s reference to Teleborian at first made her furious. Then she realized that he was not trying to start a fight. He had no idea who Teleborian was and had probably only seen him on TV, where he came across as a responsible, internationally respected expert.
But what really shook her was the reference to Wennerström’s billions. She had no idea how he had wormed out that information. She was absolutely certain that she had made no mistakes and that nobody in the world could know what she had done.
She read the letter over several times.
The reference to friendship made her uncomfortable. She didn’t know how to respond to it.
A short time later she created [Cryptic 4].
I’ll think about it.
She disconnected and went to her window seat.
Salander had exhausted her supply of Billy’s Pan Pizza as well as the last crumb of bread and rind of cheese. For the last three days she had survived on a packet of instant oats that she had bought on impulse with the vague idea that she ought to eat more nourishing food. She discovered that half a cup of oats with a few raisins and a cup of water turned into an edible portion of hot cereal after a minute in the microwave.
It was not only the lack of food that got her on the move. She had someone to look after. Unfortunately that was not something she could do while holed up in her apartment. She went to her wardrobe and took out the blond wig and Irene Nesser’s Norwegian passport.
Fröken Nesser did exist in real life. She was similar in appearance to Salander and she had lost her passport three years earlier. It came to be in Salander’s hands thanks to Plague, and she had used Nesser’s identity when necessary for almost eighteen months.
Salander took the ring out of her eyebrow and put on makeup at the bathroom mirror. She dressed in dark jeans, a warm brown sweater with yellow trim, and walking boots with heels. She took out a Mace canister from her small supply. She also found her Taser, which she hadn’t touched in a year, and plugged it in to charge. She put a change of clothes in a shoulder bag. And at 11:00 on Friday night, nine days after the murders, Salander left her apartment in Mosebacke.
She walked to McDonald’s on Hornsgatan. It was less likely that any of her former colleagues from Milton Security would run into her there than at the one near Slussen or at Medborgarplatsen. She ate a Big Mac and drank a large Coke.
Then she took the number 4 bus across Västerbron to St.Eriksplan. She walked to Odenplan and found herself outside Bjurman’s apartment building on Upplandsgatan just after midnight. She did not expect the apartment to be under surveillance, but she saw a light in the window of an apartment on the same floor, so she walked on towards Vanadisplan. The light was off when she came back an hour later.
She went up the stairs on tiptoe without turning on the light in the stairwell. With the aid of a Stanley knife she cut the police tape that sealed the apartment. She opened the door without a sound.
She turned on the hall lamp, which she knew could not be seen from the outside, and switched on a pen torch to light her way to the bedroom. The venetian blinds were closed. She played the beam of light over the bloodstained bed. She recalled that she had been very close to dying in that bed and suddenly had a feeling of deep satisfaction that Bjurman was forever out of her life.
The reason for her visit to the crime scene was to get two pieces of information. First, she didn’t understand the connection between Bjurman and Zala. She was convinced there had to be one, but she hadn’t been able to find it from anything she found in Bjurman’s computer.
Second was an inconsistency that kept gnawing at her. During her nighttime visit a few weeks earlier she noticed that Bjurman had taken documentation about her out of the file box where he kept all his guardianship material. The pages that were missing were part of his brief from the agency which summarized Salander’s psychological state in the most concise terms. Bjurman no longer had any need of these pages, and it was possible that he had cleared out the file and thrown them away. On the other hand, lawyers never throw away documents relating to an unfinished case. And yet these papers had once been in the file box relating to her, and she had not found them in his desk or anywhere near it.
She saw that the police had removed the files that dealt with her case, as well as some others. She spent more than two hours searching every inch of the apartment in case the police had missed anything, but eventually she came to the conclusion that they had not.
In the kitchen she found a drawer which contained various keys: car keys, as well as a general key to the building and a padlock key. She quietly went up to the attic floor, where she tried all the padlocks until she found Bjurman’s storage unit. In it was some furniture, as well as a wardrobe full of old clothes, skis, a car battery, cardboard boxes of books, and some other junk. She discovered nothing of interest, so she went back downstairs and used the general key to get into the garage. She worked out which was his Mercedes, but a brief search turned up nothing of value there either.
She did not bother to go to his office. She had been there only a few weeks earlier, around the time of her previous visit to his apartment, and she knew that for the past two years he had hardly used it.
Salander returned to Bjurman’s apartment and sat on his living-room sofa to think. After a few minutes she got up and went back to the key drawer in the kitchen. She studied the keys one by one. One set belonged to front-door and dead-bolt locks, but another key was rusty and old-fashioned. She frowned. Then she raised h
er eyes to a shelf above the kitchen counter, where Bjurman had put about twenty seed packets, seeds for an herb garden.
He has a summer cabin. Or an allotment somewhere. That’s what I missed.
It took her three minutes to locate a receipt, six years old, in Bjurman’s account book showing that he had paid for work on his driveway, and it took another minute to find an insurance policy for a property near Stallarholmen outside Mariefred.
At 5:00 in the morning she stopped at the twenty-four-hour 7-Eleven at the top of Hantverkargatan up by Fridhemsplan. She bought an armful of Billy’s Pan Pizzas, some milk, bread, cheese, and other staples. She also bought a morning paper with a headline that fascinated her.
Wanted woman fled country?
This particular paper did not, for some reason, name her. She was referred to instead as the “26-year-old woman.” The article stated that a source within the police claimed that she might have escaped abroad and could now be in Berlin. The police had apparently received a tip that she had been seen in Kreuzberg at an “anarcho-feminist club” described as a hangout for young people associated with everything from terrorism to antiglobalization and Satanism.
She took the number 4 bus back to Södermalm, where she got off at Rosenlundsgatan and walked home to Mosebacke. She made coffee and had a sandwich before she went to bed.
***
She slept until late in the afternoon. When she woke she took stock and decided that it was high time she changed the sheets. She spent the evening cleaning her apartment. She took out the trash and collected newspapers in two plastic bags and put them in a closet in the stairwell. She washed a load of underwear and T-shirts and then a load of jeans. She filled the dishwasher and turned it on. Then she vacuumed and mopped the floor.
It was 9:00 p.m. and she was drenched with sweat. She turned on the faucet in the tub and poured in plenty of bubble bath. She lay back and closed her eyes and brooded. When she woke up, it was midnight and the water was cold. She got out, dried off, and went back to bed. She fell asleep almost immediately.
The Girl who played with Fire m(-2 Page 38
