The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest m(-3

by Stieg Larsson

  “You think that the murder of Zalachenko… but the murderer was a geriatric psycho.”

  “Malin, I don’t believe in coincidence. Somebody is covering Zalachenko’s tracks. I don’t care who people think that old lunatic was or how many crazy letters he wrote to government ministers. He was a hired killer of some sort. He went there to kill Zalachenko… and maybe Lisbeth too.”

  “But he committed suicide, or tried to. What hired killer would do that?”

  Blomkvist thought for a moment. He met the editor-in-chief’s gaze.

  “Maybe someone who’s seventy-eight and hasn’t much to lose. He’s mixed up in all this, and when we finish digging we’ll prove it.”

  Eriksson studied Blomkvist’s face. She had never before seen him so composed and unflinching. She shuddered. Blomkvist noticed her reaction.

  “One more thing. We’re no longer in a battle with a gang of criminals, this time it’s with a government department. It’s going to be tough.”

  Eriksson nodded.

  “I didn’t imagine things would go this far. Malin… what happened today makes very plain how dangerous this could get. If you want out, just say the word.”

  She wondered what Berger would have said. Then stubbornly she shook her head.

  PART II. HACKER REPUBLIC

  1 – 22.V

  An Irish law from the year 697 forbids women to be soldiers – which means that women had been soldiers previously. Peoples who over the centuries have recruited female soldiers include Arabs, Berbers, Kurds, Rajputs, Chinese, Filipinos, Maoris, Papuans, Australian aborigines, Micronesians and American Indians.

  There is a wealth of legend about fearsome female warriors from ancient Greece. These tales speak of women who were trained in the arts of war from childhood – in the use of weapons, and how to cope with physical privation. They lived apart from the men and went to war in their own regiments. The tales tell us that they conquered men on the field of battle. Amazons occur in Greek literature in the Iliad of Homer, for example, in 600 B.C.

  It was the Greeks who coined the term Amazon. The word literally means “without breast”. It is said that in order to facilitate the drawing of a bow, the female’s right breast was removed, either in early childhood or with a red-hot iron after she became an adult. Even though the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen are said to have agreed that this operation would enhance the ability to use weapons, it is doubtful whether such operations were actually performed. Herein lies a linguistic riddle – whether the prefix “a-” in Amazon does indeed mean “without”. It has been suggested that it means the opposite – that an Amazon was a woman with especially large breasts. Nor is there a single example in any museum of a drawing, amulet or statue of a woman without her right breast, which should have been a common motif had the legend about breast amputation been based on fact.

  CHAPTER 8

  SUNDAY, 1.V – MONDAY, 2.V

  Berger took a deep breath as the lift door opened and she walked into the editorial offices of Svenska Morgon-Posten. It was 10.15 in the morning. She was dressed for the office in black trousers, a red jumper and a dark jacket. It was glorious May 1 weather, and on her way through the city she noticed that the workers’ groups had begun to gather. It dawned on her that she had not been part of such a parade in more than twenty years.

  For a moment she stood, alone and invisible, next to the lift doors. First day on the job. She could see a large part of the editorial office with the news desk in the centre. She saw the glass doors of the editor-in-chief’s office, which was now hers.

  She was not at all sure right now that she was the person to lead the sprawling organization that comprised S.M.P. It was a gigantic step up from Millennium with a staff of five to a daily newspaper with eighty reporters and another ninety people in administration, with I.T. personnel, layout artists, photographers, advertising reps, and all else it takes to publish a newspaper. Add to that a publishing house, a production company and a management company. More than 230 people.

  As she stood there she asked herself whether the whole thing was not a hideous mistake.

  Then the older of the two receptionists noticed who had just come into the office. She got up and came out from behind the counter and extended her hand.

  “Fru Berger, welcome to S.M.P.”

  “Call me Erika. Hello.”

  “Beatrice. Welcome. Shall I show you where to find Editor-in-Chief Morander? I should say ‘outgoing editor-in-chief’?”

  “Thank you, I see him sitting in the glass cage over there,” said Berger with a smile. “I can find my way, but thanks for the offer.”

  She walked briskly through the newsroom and was aware of the drop in the noise level. She felt everyone’s eyes upon her. She stopped at the half-empty news desk and gave a friendly nod.

  “We’ll introduce ourselves properly in a while,” she said, and then walked over to knock on the door of the glass cubicle.

  The departing editor-in-chief, Håkan Morander, had spent twelve years in the glass cage. Just like Berger, he had been head-hunted from outside the company – so he had once taken that very same first walk to his office. He looked up at her, puzzled, and then stood up.

  “Hello, Erika,” he said. “I thought you were starting Monday.”

  “I couldn’t stand sitting at home one more day. So here I am.”

  Morander held out his hand. “Welcome. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re taking over.”

  “How are you feeling?” Berger said.

  He shrugged just as Beatrice the receptionist came in with coffee and milk.

  “It feels as though I’m already operating at half speed. Actually I don’t want to talk about it. You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn’t much time left. But one thing is for sure – I don’t mean to spend the rest of it in this glass cage.”

  He rubbed his chest. He had heart and artery problems, which was the reason for his going and why Berger was to start several months earlier than originally announced.

  Berger turned and looked out over the landscape of the newsroom. She saw a reporter and a photographer heading for the lift, perhaps on their way to cover the May Day parade.

  “Håkan… if I’m being a nuisance or if you’re busy today, I’ll come back tomorrow or the day after.”

  “Today’s task is to write an editorial on the demonstrations. I could do it in my sleep. If the pinkos want to start a war with Denmark, then I have to explain why they’re wrong. If the pinkos want to avoid a war with Denmark, I have to explain why they’re wrong.”

  “Denmark?”

  “Correct. The message on May Day has to touch on the immigrant integration question. The pinkos, of course, no matter what they say, are wrong.”

  He burst out laughing.

  “Always so cynical?”

  “Welcome to S.M.P.”

  Erika had never had an opinion about Morander. He was an anonymous power figure among the elite of editors-in-chief. In his editorials he came across as boring and conservative. Expert in complaining about taxes, and a typical libertarian when it came to freedom of the press. But she had never met him in person.

  “Do you have time to tell me about the job?”

  “I’m gone at the end of June. We’ll work side by side for two months. You’ll discover positive things and negative things. I’m a cynic, so mostly I see the negative things.”

  He got up and stood next to her to look through the glass at the newsroom.

  “You’ll discover that – it comes with the job – you’re going to have a number of adversaries out there – daily editors and veterans among the editors who have created their own little empires. They have their own club that you can’t join. They’ll try to stretch the boundaries, to push through their own headlines and angles. You’ll have to fight hard to hold your own.”

  Berger nodded.

  “Your night editors are Billinger and Karlsson… they’
re a whole chapter unto themselves. They hate each other and, importantly, they don’t work the same shift, but they both act as if they’re publishers and editors-in-chief. Then there’s Anders Holm, the news editor – you’ll be working with him a lot. You’ll have your share of clashes with him. In point of fact, he’s the one who gets S.M.P. out every day. Some of the reporters are prize primadonnas, and some of them should really be put out to grass.”

  “Have you got any good colleagues?”

  Morander laughed again.

  “Oh yes, but you’re going to have to decide for yourself which ones you can get along with. Some of the reporters out there are seriously good.”

  “How about management?”

  “Magnus Borgsjö is chairman of the board. He was the one who recruited you. He’s charming. A bit old school and yet at the same time a bit of a reformer, but he’s above all the one who makes the decisions. Some of the board members, including several from the family which owns the paper, mostly seem to sit and kill time, while others flutter around, professional board-member types.”

  “You don’t seem to be exactly enamoured of your board.”

  “There’s a division of labour. We put out the paper. They take care of the finances. They’re not supposed to interfere with the content, but situations do crop up. To be honest, Erika, between the two of us, this is going to be tough.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Circulation has dropped by nearly 150,000 copies since the glory days of the ’60s, and there may soon come a time when S.M.P. is no longer profitable. We’ve reorganized, cut more than 180 jobs since 1980. We went over to tabloid format – which we should have done twenty years sooner. S.M.P. is still one of the big papers, but it wouldn’t take much for us to be regarded as a second-class paper. If it hasn’t already happened.”

  “Why did they pick me then?” Berger said.

  “Because the median age of our readers is fifty-plus, and the growth in readers in their twenties is almost zero. The paper has to be rejuvenated. And the reasoning among the board was to bring in the most improbable editor-in-chief they could think of.”

  “A woman?”

  “Not just any woman. The woman who crushed Wennerström’s empire, who is considered the queen of investigative journalism, and who has a reputation for being the toughest. Picture it. It’s irresistible. If you can’t rejuvenate this paper, nobody can. S.M.P. isn’t just hiring Erika Berger, we’re hiring the whole mystique that goes with your name.”

  When Blomkvist left Café Copacabana next to the Kvarter cinema at Hornstull, it was just past 2.00 p.m. He put on his dark glasses and turned up Bergsundsstrand on his way to the tunnelbana. He noticed the grey Volvo at once, parked at the corner. He passed it without slowing down. Same registration, and the car was empty.

  It was the seventh time he had seen the same car in four days. He had no idea how long the car had been in his neighbourhood. It was pure chance that he had noticed it at all. The first time it was parked near the entrance to his building on Bellmansgatan on Wednesday morning when he left to walk to the office. He happened to read the registration number, which began with KAB, and he paid attention because those were the initials of Zalachenko’s holding company, Karl Axel Bodin Inc. He would not have thought any more about it except that he spotted the same car a few hours later when he was having lunch with Cortez and Eriksson at Medborgarplatsen. That time the Volvo was parked on a side street near the Millennium offices.

  He wondered whether he was becoming paranoid, but when he visited Palmgren the same afternoon at the rehabilitation home in Ersta, the car was in the visitors’ car park. That could not have been chance. Blomkvist began to keep an eye on everything around him. And when he saw the car again the next morning he was not surprised.

  Not once had he seen its driver.

  A call to the national vehicle register revealed that the car belonged to a Göran Mårtensson of Vittangigaten in Vällingby. An hour’s research turned up the information that Mårtensson held the title of business consultant and owned a private company whose address was a P.O. box on Fleminggatan in Kungsholmen. Mårtensson’s C.V. was an interesting one. In 1983, at eighteen, he had done his military service with the coast guard, and then enrolled in the army. By 1989 he had advanced to lieutenant, and then he switched to study at the police academy in Solna. Between 1991 and 1996 he worked for the Stockholm police. In 1997 he was no longer on the official roster of the external service, and in 1999 he had registered his own company.

  So – Säpo.

  An industrious investigative journalist could get paranoid on less than this. Blomkvist concluded that he was under surveillance, but it was being carried out so clumsily that he could hardly have helped but notice.

  Or was it clumsy? The only reason he first noticed the car was the registration number, which just happened to mean something to him. But for the KAB, he would not have given the car a second glance.

  On Friday KAB was conspicuous by its absence. Blomkvist could not be absolutely sure, but he thought he had been tailed by a red Audi that day. He had not managed to catch the registration number. On Friday the Volvo was back.

  Exactly twenty seconds after Blomkvist left Café Copacabana, Malm raised his Nikon in the shadows of Café Rosso’s awning across the street and took a series of twelve photographs of the two men who followed Blomkvist out of the café and past the Kvarter cinema.

  One of the men looked to be in his late thirties or early forties and had blond hair. The other seemed a bit older, with thinning reddish-blond hair and sunglasses. Both were dressed in jeans and leather jackets.

  They parted company at the grey Volvo. The older man got in, and the younger one followed Blomkvist towards Hornstull tunnelbana station.

  Malm lowered the camera. Blomkvist had given him no good reason for insisting that he patrol the neighbourhood near the Copacabana on Sunday afternoon looking for a grey Volvo with a registration beginning KAB. Blomkvist told him to position himself where he could photograph whoever got into the car, probably just after 3.00. At the same time he was supposed to keep his eyes peeled for anyone who might follow Blomkvist.

  It sounded like the prelude to a typical Blomkvist adventure. Malm was never quite sure whether Blomkvist was paranoid by nature or if he had paranormal gifts. Since the events in Gosseberga his colleague had certainly become withdrawn and hard to communicate with. Nothing unusual about this, though. But when Blomkvist was working on a complicated story – Malm had observed the same obsessive and secretive behaviour in the weeks before the Wennerström story broke – it became more pronounced.

  On the other hand, Malm could see for himself that Blomkvist was indeed being tailed. He wondered vaguely what new nightmare was in the offing. Whatever it was, it would soak up all of Millennium’s time, energy and resources. Malm did not think it was a great idea for Blomkvist to set off on some wild scheme just when the magazine’s editor-in-chief had deserted to the Big Daily, and now Millennium’s laboriously reconstructed stability was suddenly hanging once again in the balance.

  But Malm had not participated in any parade – apart from Gay Pride – in at least ten years. He had nothing better to do on this May Day Sunday than humour his wayward publisher. He sauntered after the man tailing Blomkvist even though he had not been instructed to do so, but he lost sight him on Långholmsgatan.

  One of the first things Blomkvist did when he realized that his mobile was bugged was to send Cortez out to buy some used handsets. Cortez bought a job lot of Ericsson T10s for a song. Blomkvist then opened some anonymous cash-card accounts on Comviq and distributed the mobiles to Eriksson, Cortez, Giannini, Malm and Armansky, also keeping one for himself. They were to be used only for conversations that absolutely must not be overheard. Day-to-day stuff they could and should do on their own mobiles. Which meant that they all had to carry two mobiles with them.

  Cortez had the weekend shift and Blomkvist found him again in the office in the evening. Since
the murder of Zalachenko, Blomkvist had devised a 24/7 roster, so that Millennium’s office was always staffed and someone slept there every night. The roster included himself, Cortez, Eriksson and Malm. Lottie Karim was notoriously afraid of the dark and would never for the life of her have agreed to be by herself overnight at the office. Nilsson was not afraid of the dark, but she worked so furiously on her projects that she was encouraged to go home when the day was done. Magnusson was getting on in years and as advertising manager had nothing to do with the editorial side. He was also about to go on holiday.

  “Anything new?”

  “Nothing special,” Cortez said. “Today is all about May 1, naturally enough.”

  “I’m going to be here for a couple of hours,” Blomkvist told him. “Take a break and come back around 9.00.”

  After Cortez left, Blomkvist got out his anonymous mobile and called Daniel Olsson, a freelance journalist in Göteborg. Over the years Millennium had published several of his articles and Blomkvist had great faith in his ability to gather background material.

  “Hi, Daniel. Mikael Blomkvist here. Can you talk?”

  “Sure.”

  “I need someone for a research job. You can bill us for five days, and you don’t have to produce an article at the end of it. Well, you can write an article on the subject if you want and we’ll publish it, but it’s the research we’re after.”

  “Fine. Tell me.”

  “It’s sensitive. You can’t discuss this with anyone except me, and you can communicate with me only via hotmail. You must not even mention that you’re doing research for Millennium.”

  “This sounds fun. What are you looking for?”

  “I want you to do a workplace report on Sahlgrenska hospital. We’re calling the report ‘E.R.’, and it’s to look at the differences between reality and the T.V. series. I want you to go to the hospital and observe the work in the emergency ward and the intensive care unit for a couple of days. Talk with doctors, nurses and cleaners – everybody who works there in fact. What are their working conditions like? What do they actually do? That sort of stuff. Photographs too, of course.”