Millennium 02 - The Girl Who Played with Fire

by Stieg Larsson

  The call came through to the police in Strängnäs at 3:18 p.m. It came directly to the switchboard and not through the emergency services. A man named Öberg, owner of a summer cabin just east of Stallarholmen, reported that he had heard what sounded like a shot and went to see what was going on. He had found two severely wounded men. Well, one of the men may not have been so severely wounded, but he was in a lot of pain. And the cabin they were lying in front of was owned by Nils Bjurman, a lawyer. The late Nils Bjurman, that is—the man there was so much about in the papers.

  The Strängnäs police had already had an eventful day with an extensive traffic check in the community. During the course of the morning the traffic assignment had been interrupted when a call came in that a middle-aged woman had been killed by her boyfriend at the house they shared in Finninge. At almost the same time a fire had spread from an outhouse into a property in Storgärdet. One body was found in the wreckage. And to top it all off, two cars had collided head-on on the Enköping highway. Accordingly, the Strängnäs police force was busy, almost to a man.

  The duty officer, however, had been following the developments in Nykvarn that morning, and she deduced that this new commotion must have something to do with that Lisbeth Salander everyone was talking about. Not least since Nils Bjurman was a part of the investigation. She took action on three fronts. She requisitioned the only remaining police van and drove directly to Stallarholmen. She called her colleagues in Södertälje and asked for assistance. The Södertälje force was also spread thin since part of their manpower had been sent to dig up bodies around a burned-out warehouse south of Nykvarn, but the possible connection between Nykvarn and Stallarholmen prompted another duty officer in Södertälje to dispatch two cruisers to Stallarholmen to assist. In the end the duty officer from Strängnäs called Inspector Bublanski in Stockholm. She reached him on his mobile.

  Bublanski was at Milton Security in a meeting with its CEO, Armansky, and two of his staff, Fräklund and Bohman. Hedström was conspicuous by his absence.

  Bublanski immediately sent Andersson out to Bjurman’s summer cabin and told him to take Faste if he could get hold of him. After thinking for a moment, Bublanski also called Holmberg, who was near Nykvarn and therefore considerably closer to Stallarholmen.

  Holmberg had some news for him too. “We’ve identified the body in the pit.”

  “That’s impossible. How so fast?”

  “Everything’s simple when the corpse considerately has himself buried with his wallet and laminated ID.”

  “Who is it?”

  “A bit of a celebrity. Kenneth Gustafsson, known as the Vagabond. Does it ring a bell?”

  “Are you kidding? Downtown hooligan, pusher, petty thief, and addict? He’s lying in a hole in Nykvarn?”

  “Yes, that’s the man. At least that’s the ID in the wallet. Identification will have to be confirmed by forensics, and it’s going to be like putting a puzzle together. The Vagabond was chopped into five or six pieces.”

  “Interesting. Paolo Roberto said that the super heavyweight he was fighting threatened Miriam Wu with a chain saw.”

  “Could very well have been a chain saw, but I haven’t looked that closely. We’ve just started digging up the second site. They’re busy setting up the tent.”

  “That’s good. Jerker—it’s been a long day, I know, but can you stay on this evening?”

  “Sure, OK. I’ll let them get on with it here and head on to Stallarholmen.”

  Bublanski disconnected and rubbed his eyes.

  The armed response team hastily assembled from Strängnäs arrived at Bjurman’s summer cabin at 3:44 p.m. On the access road they literally collided with a man on a Harley-Davidson, who was wobbling along until he steered right into the oncoming van. It was not a serious collision. The police climbed out and identified Sonny Nieminen, thirty-seven years old and a known killer from the mid-nineties. Nieminen seemed to be in bad shape. When they put the cuffs on him, they were surprised to find that the back of his vest was slashed. A piece of leather about eight inches square was missing. It looked peculiar. Nieminen was unwilling to discuss the matter.

  They locked him in the van and drove on two hundred yards to the cabin. They found a retired harbour worker by the name of Öberg putting a splint on the foot of one Carl-Magnus Lundin, thirty-six years old and president of the gang that called itself Svavelsjö MC.

  The leader of the police team was Inspector Nils-Henrik Johansson. He climbed out, straightened his shoulder belt, and looked at the sorry creature on the ground.

  Öberg stopped bandaging Lundin’s foot and gave Johansson a wry look.

  “I’m the one who called.”

  “You reported shots being fired.”

  “I reported that I heard a single shot and came over to investigate and found these guys. This one has been shot in the foot and beaten up pretty badly. I think he needs an ambulance.”

  Öberg glanced towards the police van.

  “I see you got the other guy. He was out cold when I arrived, but he didn’t seem to be wounded. He came to after a while, but he didn’t stick around to help his buddy.”

  Holmberg arrived at the same time as the police from Södertälje, just as the ambulance was driving away. He was given a brief rundown of the team’s observations. Neither Lundin nor Nieminen had been willing to explain how he came to be there. Lundin was hardly in any condition to talk at all.

  “So—two bikers in leathers, one Harley-Davidson, one gunshot victim, and no weapon. Have I got it right?” Holmberg said.

  Johansson nodded.

  “Should we discount that one of these macho heroes rode bitch?”

  “I think that would be considered unmanly in their circles,” Johansson said.

  “In that case, we’re missing one motorcycle. Since the weapon is missing too, we may conclude that a third party has left the scene with one motorcycle and one weapon.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “And it creates a conundrum. If these two gentlemen from Svavelsjö came on motorcycles, we’re also missing the vehicle in which the third party arrived. The third party couldn’t have taken both his own vehicle and the bike. And it’s a pretty long walk from the Strängnäs highway.”

  “Unless the third party was living in the cabin.”

  “Hmm,” Holmberg said. “But the cabin is owned by the deceased Advokat Bjurman, and he definitely no longer lives here.”

  “Maybe there was a fourth party who left in a car.”

  “Then why wouldn’t the two have gone in the car together? I’m assuming that this story isn’t about the theft of a Harley, no matter how desirable they are.”

  He thought for a moment and then asked the team to assign two uniforms to look for an abandoned vehicle on the forest roads nearby and to knock on doors in the area to ask if anyone had seen anything unusual.

  “There aren’t that many cabins inhabited at this time of year,” the team leader said, but he promised to do his best.

  Holmberg opened the unlocked door to the cabin. He straightaway found the box of files on the kitchen table with Bjurman’s reports about Salander. He sat down and began paging through them, his astonishment growing.

  Holmberg’s team was in luck. Just half an hour after they began knocking on doors among the intermittently populated cabins, they found Anna Viktoria Hansson. She had spent the spring morning clearing up a garden near the access road to the summer-cabin area. Yes indeed, she might be seventy-two, but she had good eyesight. Yes indeed, she had seen a short girl in a dark jacket walk past around lunchtime. At three in the afternoon two men on motorcycles had driven by. They made an appalling racket. And shortly after that, the girl had gone back the other way on one of the motorcycles, or maybe on a different one altogether. Well, it looked like the girl, but in the helmet she could not be 100 percent certain. And then the police cars started arriving.

  Just as Holmberg was getting this statement, Andersson arrived at the cabin.

/>   “What’s happening here?” he said.

  Holmberg looked glumly at his colleague. “I don’t quite know how to explain this to you,” he said.

  “Jerker, are you trying to tell me that Salander turned up at Bjurman’s cabin and all by herself beat the shit out of the top echelon of the Svavelsjö MC?” Bublanski sounded tense.

  “Well, she was trained by Paolo Roberto.”

  “Jerker, please. Give me a break.”

  “OK, listen to this. Magnus Lundin has a bullet wound in his foot. Which is going to do him permanent damage. The bullet went out the back of his heel, blew his boot to kingdom come.”

  “At least she didn’t shoot him in the head.”

  “Apparently that wasn’t necessary. According to the local team, Lundin has serious injuries to his face: a broken jaw and two teeth knocked out. The medics suspected a concussion. Besides the gunshot wound to his foot, he also has a massive pain in his abdomen.”

  “How’s Nieminen doing?”

  “He seems unhurt. But according to the old man who called in, he was unconscious when he arrived. Nieminen came to after a while and was trying to leave just as the Strängnäs team got there.”

  Bublanski was speechless.

  “There’s one mysterious detail,” Holmberg said.

  “Another one?”

  “Nieminen’s leather vest… He came here on his bike.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was ripped.”

  “What do you mean, ripped?”

  “There’s a chunk missing. About eight by eight inches cut out of the back of it. Just where Svavelsjö MC has its insignia.”

  Bublanski raised his eyebrows. “Why would Salander cut a square out of his vest? For a trophy? For revenge? But revenge for what?”

  “No idea. But I thought of one other thing,” Holmberg said. “Magnus Lundin is a hefty guy with a ponytail. One of the guys who kidnapped Salander’s girlfriend had a beer belly and a ponytail.”

  Salander had not had such a rush since she visited Gröna Lund amusement park several years before and rode on the Freefall. She went on it three times and could have gone another three if she had had the money.

  It was one thing to ride a 125cc lightweight Kawasaki, which was really no more than a heavily souped-up moped, but it was something else entirely to maintain control of a 1450cc Harley-Davidson. Her first three hundred yards on Bjurman’s badly maintained forest track was a regular roller coaster, and she felt like a living gyro. Twice she almost rode into the woods before at the last second she managed to regain control of the hog.

  The helmet kept slipping down and masking her vision, even though she had put in some extra stuffing using a piece of leather she’d cut out of Nieminen’s padded vest.

  She did not dare stop to adjust the helmet for fear she would not be able to manage the bike’s weight. She was too short to reach the ground with both feet and was afraid the Harley would tip over. If that happened, she would never be able to get it upright again.

  Things went more smoothly once she got on the wider gravel road leading to the summer-cabin area. When she turned onto the Strängnäs highway a few minutes later, she risked taking one hand off the handlebars to set the helmet right. Then she gave the bike some gas. She covered the distance to Södertälje in record time, smiling in delight the whole way. Just before she reached Södertälje, two blue-and-yellow police Volvos with their sirens on flew by in the other direction.

  The sensible course would be to dump the Harley in Södertälje and let Irene Nesser take the shuttle train into Stockholm, but Salander couldn’t resist the temptation. She turned onto the E4 and accelerated. She did not go over the speed limit—well, not much anyway—but it still felt as though she were in freefall. Not until she reached Älvsjö did she turn off and find her way to the fairground, where she managed to park the beast without tipping it over. She was very sad to leave the bike behind, along with the helmet and the piece of leather from Nieminen’s vest. She walked to the shuttle train. She was seriously chilled. She rode the one stop to Södra station, then walked home to Mosebacke and ran herself a hot bath.

  • • •

  “His name is Alexander Zalachenko,” Björck said. “But officially he doesn’t exist. You won’t find him on the national register.”

  Zala. Alexander Zalachenko. Finally a name.

  “Who is he and how can I find him?”

  “He’s not someone you’d want to find.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “What I’m going to tell you is top secret information. If it came out that I told you this, I’d be sent to prison. It’s one of the most deeply buried secrets we have within the Swedish defence system. You have to understand why it’s so important that you guarantee my anonymity.”

  “I’ve already done that,” Blomkvist said impatiently.

  “Alexander Zalachenko was born in 1940 in Stalingrad. When he was a year old, the German offensive on the eastern front began. Both of Zalachenko’s parents died in the war. At least that’s what Zalachenko thinks. He doesn’t really know what happened during the war. His earliest memories are of an orphanage in the Ural Mountains.”

  Blomkvist made swift notes.

  “The orphanage was in a garrison town and was, as it were, sponsored by the Red Army. You might say that Zalachenko got a military education very early. Since the end of the Soviet Union, documents have emerged which show there were experiments to create a cadre of particularly athletic, elite soldiers among the orphans who were being raised by the state. Zalachenko was one of them. To make a long story short, when he was five he was put in an army school. It turned out that he was talented. When he was fifteen, in 1955, he was sent to a military school in Novosibirsk, where together with two thousand other pupils he underwent training similar to Spetsnaz, the Russian elite troops.”

  “OK, let’s get to the adult stuff.”

  “In 1958, when he was eighteen, he was moved to Minsk, to specialist training with the GRU—Glavnoye razvedyvatelnoye upravlenie, the military intelligence service that is directly subordinate to the army high command, not to be confused with the KGB, the civil secret police. The GRU usually took care of espionage and foreign operations. When he was twenty, Zalachenko was sent to Cuba. It was a training period and he was still only the equivalent of a second lieutenant. But he was there for two years, during the Cuban missile crisis and the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. In 1963 he went back to Minsk for further training. Thereafter he was stationed first in Bulgaria and then in Hungary. In 1965 he was promoted to lieutenant and got his first posting to Western Europe, in Rome, where he served for a year. That was his first undercover assignment. He was a civilian with a fake passport, obviously, and with no contact with the embassy.”

  Blomkvist nodded as he wrote. Against his will he was starting to get interested.

  “In 1967 he was moved to London. There he organized the execution of a defected KGB agent. Over the next ten years he became one of the GRU’s top agents. He belonged to the real elite of devoted political soldiers. He speaks six languages fluently. He’s worked as a journalist, a photographer, in advertising, as a sailor—you name it. He’s a survival artist, an expert in disguise and deception. He commanded his own agents and organized or carried out his own operations. Several of these operations were contracts for hits, and a large number of them took place in the third world, but he was also involved in extortion, intimidation, and all kinds of other assignments that his superiors needed him to perform. In 1969 he was promoted to captain, in 1972 to major, and in 1975 to lieutenant colonel.”

  “Why did he come to Sweden?”

  “I’m getting to that. Over the years he became corrupt, and he squirrelled away a little money here and there. He drank too much and did too much womanizing. All this was noted by his superiors, but he was still a favourite and they could overlook the small stuff. In 1976 he was sent to Spain on a mission. We don’t need to go into the details, but he made a fool of himself
. The mission failed and all of a sudden he was in disgrace and called back to Russia. He chose to ignore the order and thereby ended up in an even worse situation. The GRU ordered a military attaché at the embassy in Madrid to find him and talk some sense into him. Something went wrong, and Zalachenko killed the man. Now he had no choice. He had burned his bridges and rashly decided to defect. He laid a trail that seemed to lead from Spain to Portugal and possibly to a boating accident. He also left clues indicating he intended to flee to the United States. He chose in fact to defect to the most improbable country in Europe. He came to Sweden, where he contacted the Security Police, Säpo, and sought asylum. This was well thought out, because the probability that a death squad from the KGB or the GRU would look for him here was almost zero.”

  Björck fell silent.

  “And?”

  “What’s the government supposed to do if one of the Soviet Union’s top spies defects and seeks asylum in Sweden? A conservative government was coming into power. As a matter of fact, it was one of the very first matters we had to take to the newly appointed foreign minister. Those political cowards tried to get rid of him like a hot potato, of course, but they couldn’t just send him back to the Soviets—that would have been a scandal of unmatched proportions if it ever came out. Instead they tried to send him to the States or to England. Zalachenko refused. He didn’t like America and he knew that England was one of those countries where the Soviets had agents at the highest levels within military intelligence. He didn’t want to go to Israel, because he didn’t like Jews. So he decided to make his home in Sweden.”

  The whole thing sounded so improbable that it occurred to Blomkvist that Björck might be pulling his leg.

  “So he stayed in Sweden?”

  “Exactly. For many years it was one of the country’s best-kept military secrets. The thing was, we got plenty of good information out of Zalachenko. For a time during the late seventies and early eighties, he was the jewel in the crown among defectors, the most senior from one of the GRU’s elite commands.”

  “So he could sell information?”