“I had no defence. The information in the article was wrong.”
“When I hacked your computer and read your email exchange with Berger, there were plenty of references to the Wennerström affair, but you two kept discussing practical details about the trial and nothing about what actually happened. What was it that went wrong?”
“Lisbeth, I can’t let the real story get out. I fell into a trap. Erika and I are quite clear that it would damage our credibility even further if we told anyone what really happened.”
“Listen, Kalle Blomkvist, yesterday afternoon you sat here preaching about friendship and trust and stuff. I’m not going to put the story on the Net.”
Blomkvist protested. It was the middle of the night. He could not face thinking about the whole thing now. She went on stubbornly sitting there until he gave in. He went to the bathroom and washed his face and put the coffeepot on. Then he came back to the bed and told her about how his old schoolfriend Robert Lindberg, in a yellow Mälar-30 in the guest marina in Arholma, had aroused his curiosity.
“You mean that your buddy was lying?”
“No, not at all. He told me exactly what he knew, and I could verify each and every word in documents from the audit at SIB. I even went to Poland and photographed the sheet-metal shack where this huge big Minos Company was housed. I interviewed several of the people who had been employed at the company. They all said exactly the same thing.”
“I don’t get it.”
Blomkvist sighed. It was a while before he spoke again.
“I had a damned good story. I still hadn’t confronted Wennerström himself, but the story was airtight; if I had published it at that moment I really would have shook him up. It might not have led to an indictment for fraud—the deal had already been approved by the auditors—but I would have damaged his reputation.”
“What went wrong?”
“Somewhere along the way somebody heard about what I was poking my nose into, and Wennerström was made aware of my existence. And all of a sudden a whole bunch of strange things started happening. First I was threatened. Anonymous calls from card telephones that were impossible to trace. Erika was also threatened. It was the usual nonsense: lie down or else we’re going to nail you to a barn door, and so on. She, of course, was mad as a hellcat.”
He took a cigarette from Salander.
“Then something extremely unpleasant happened. Late one night when I left the office I was attacked by two men who just walked up to me and gave me a couple of punches. I got a fat lip and fell down in the street. I couldn’t identify them, but one of them looked like an old biker.”
“So, next …”
“All these goings-on, of course, only had the effect of making Erika very cross indeed, and I got stubborn. We beefed up security at Millennium. The problem was that the harassment was out of all proportion to the content of the story. We couldn’t fathom why all this was happening.”
“But the story you published was something quite different.”
“Exactly. Suddenly we made a breakthrough. We found a source, a Deep Throat in Wennerström’s circle. This source was literally scared to death, and we were only allowed to meet him in hotel rooms. He told us that the money from the Minos affair had been used for weapons deals in the war in Yugoslavia. Wennerström had been making deals with the right-wing Ustashe in Croatia. Not only that, the source was able to give us copies of documents to back it up.”
“You believed him?”
“He was clever. He only ever gave us enough information to lead us to the next source, who would confirm the story. We were even given a photograph of one of Wennerström’s closest colleagues shaking hands with the buyer. It was detailed blockbuster material, and everything seemed verifiable. So we published.”
“And it was a fake.”
“It was all a fake from beginning to end. The documents were skilful forgeries. Wennerström’s lawyer was able to prove that the photograph of Wennerström’s subordinate and the Ustashe leader was a montage of two different images.”
“Fascinating,” Salander said.
“In hindsight it was very easy to see how we had been manipulated. Our original story really had damaged Wennerström. Now that story was drowned in a clever forgery. We published a story that Wennerström could pick apart point by point and prove his innocence.”
“You couldn’t back down and tell the truth? You had absolutely no proof that Wennerström had committed the falsification?”
“If we had tried to tell the truth and accused Wennerström of being behind the whole thing, nobody would have believed us. It would have looked like a desperate attempt to shift the blame from our stupidity on to an innocent leader of industry.”
“I see.”
“Wennerström had two layers of protection. If the fake had been revealed, he would have been able to claim that it was one of his enemies trying to slander him. And we at Millennium would once again have lost all credibility, since we fell for something that turned out to be false.”
“So you chose not to defend yourself and take the prison sentence.”
“I deserved it,” Blomkvist said. “I had committed libel. Now you know. Can I go back to sleep now?”
He turned off the lamp and shut his eyes. Salander lay down next to him.
“Wennerström is a gangster.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean, I know that he’s a gangster. He works with everybody from the Russian mafia to the Colombian drug cartels.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I turned in my report to Frode he gave me an extra assignment. He asked me to try to find out what really happened at the trial. I had just started working on it when he called Armansky and cancelled the job.”
“I wonder why.”
“I assume that they scrapped the investigation as soon as you accepted Henrik Vanger’s assignment. It would no longer have been of immediate interest.”
“And?”
“Well, I don’t like leaving things unresolved. I had a few weeks … free last spring when Armansky didn’t have any jobs for me, so I did some digging into Wennerström for fun.”
Blomkvist sat up and turned on the lamp and looked at Salander. He met her eyes. She actually looked guilty.
“Did you find out anything?”
“I have his entire hard disk on my computer. You can have as much proof as you need that he’s a gangster.”
CHAPTER 28
Tuesday, July 29–Friday, October 24
Blomkvist had been poring over Salander’s computer printouts for three days—boxes full of papers. The problem was that the subjects kept changing all the time. An option deal in London. A currency deal in Paris through an agent. A company with a post-office box in Gibraltar. A sudden doubling of funds in an account at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.
And then all those puzzling question marks: a trading company with 200,000 kronor in an untouched account registered five years earlier in Santiago, Chile—one of nearly thirty such companies in twelve different countries—and not a hint of what type of activity was involved. A dormant company? Waiting for what? A front for some other kind of activity? The computer gave no clue as to what was going on in Wennerström’s mind or what may have been perfectly obvious to him and so was never formulated in an electronic document.
Salander was persuaded that most of these questions would never be answered. They could see the message, but without a key they would never be able to interpret the meaning. Wennerström’s empire was like an onion from which one layer after another could be removed; a labyrinth of enterprises owned by one another. Companies, accounts, funds, securities. They reckoned that nobody—perhaps not even Wennerström himself—could have a complete overview. Wennerström’s empire had a life of its own.
But there was a pattern, or at least a hint of a pattern. A labyrinth of enterprises owned by each other. Wennerström’s empire was variously valued at between 100 and 400 billion kronor, dep
ending on whom you asked and how it was calculated. But if companies own each other’s assets—what then would be their value?
They had left Hedeby Island in great haste early in the morning after Salander dropped the bomb that was now occupying every waking moment of Blomkvist’s life. They drove to Salander’s place and spent two days in front of her computer while she guided him through Wennerström’s universe. He had plenty of questions. One of them was pure curiosity.
“Lisbeth, how are you able to operate his computer, from a purely practical point of view?”
“It’s a little invention that my friend Plague came up with. Wennerström has an IBM laptop that he works on, both at home and at the office. That means that all the information is on a single hard drive. He has a broadband connection to his property at home. Plague invented a type of cuff that you fasten around the broadband cable, and I’m testing it out for him. Everything that Wennerström sees is registered by the cuff, which forwards the data to a server somewhere else.”
“Doesn’t he have a firewall?”
Salander smiled.
“Of course he has a firewall. But the point is that the cuff also functions as a type of firewall. It takes a while to hack the computer this way. Let’s say that Wennerström gets an email; it goes first to Plague’s cuff and we can read it before it even passes through his firewall. But the ingenious part is that the email is rewritten and a few bytes of source code are added. This is repeated every time he downloads anything to his computer. Pictures are even better. He does a lot of surfing on the Net. Each time he picks up a porn picture or opens a new home page, we add several rows of source code. After a while, in several hours or several days, depending on how much he uses the computer, Wennerström has downloaded an entire programme of approximately three megabytes in which each bit is linked to the next bit.”
“And?”
“When the last bits are in place, the programme is integrated with his Internet browser. To him it will look as though his computer has locked up, and he has to restart it. During the restart a whole new software programme is installed. He uses Internet Explorer. The next time he starts Explorer, he’s really starting a whole different programme that’s invisible on his desktop and looks and functions just like Explorer, but it also does a lot of other things. First it takes control of his firewall and makes sure that everything is working. Then it starts to scan the computer and transmits bits of information every time he clicks the mouse while he’s surfing. After a while, again depending on how much he surfs, we’ve accumulated a complete mirror image of the contents of his hard drive on a server somewhere. And then it’s time for the HT.”
“HT?”
“Sorry. Plague calls it the HT. Hostile Takeover.”
“I see.”
“The really subtle thing is what happens next. When the structure is ready, Wennerström has two complete hard drives, one on his own machine and one on our server. The next time he boots up his computer, it’s actually the mirrored computer that’s starting. He’s no longer working on his own computer; in reality he’s working on our server. His computer will run a little slower, but it’s virtually not noticeable. And when I’m connected to the server, I can tap his computer in real time. Each time Wennerström presses a key on his computer I see it on mine.”
“Your friend is also a hacker?”
“He was the one who arranged the telephone tap in London. He’s a little out of it socially, but on the Net he’s a legend.”
“OK,” Blomkvist said, giving her a resigned smile. “Question number two: why didn’t you tell me about Wennerström earlier?”
“You never asked me.”
“And if I never did ask you—let’s suppose that I never met you—you would have sat here knowing that Wennerström was a gangster while Millennium went bankrupt?”
“Nobody asked me to expose Wennerström for what he is,” Salander replied in a know-it-all voice.
“Yes, but what if?”
“I did tell you,” she said.
Blomkvist dropped the subject.
Salander burned the contents of Wennerström’s hard drive—about five gigabytes—on to ten CDs, and she felt as if she had more or less moved into Blomkvist’s apartment. She waited patiently, answering all the questions he asked.
“I can’t understand how he can be so fucking dim to put all his dirty laundry on one hard drive,” he said. “If it ever got into the hands of the police …”
“People aren’t very rational. He has to believe that the police would never think of confiscating his computer.”
“Above suspicion. I agree that he’s an arrogant bastard, but he must have security consultants telling him how to handle his computer. There’s material on this machine going all the way back to 1993.”
“The computer itself is relatively new. It was manufactured a year ago, but he seems to have transferred all his old correspondence and everything else on to the hard drive instead of storing it on CDs. But at least he’s using an encryption programme.”
“Which is totally useless if you’re inside his computer and reading the passwords every time he types them in.”
After they’d been back in Stockholm for four days, Malm called on Blomkvist’s mobile at 3:00 in the morning.
“Henry Cortez was at a bar with his girlfriend tonight.”
“Uh-huh,” Blomkvist said, sleepily.
“On the way home they ended up at Centralen’s bar.”
“Not a very good place for a seduction.”
“Listen. Dahlman is on holiday. Henry discovered him sitting at a table with some guy.”
“And?”
“Henry recognised the man from his byline pic. Krister Söder.”
“I don’t think I recognise the name, but …”
“He works for Monopoly Financial Magazine, which is owned by the Wennerström Group.”
Blomkvist sat up straight in bed.
“Are you there?”
“I’m here. That might not mean anything. Söder is a journalist, and he might be an old friend.”
“Maybe I’m being paranoid. But a while ago Millennium bought a story from a freelancer. The week before we were going to publish it, Söder ran an exposé that was almost identical. It was the story about the mobile telephone manufacturer and the defective component.”
“I hear what you’re saying. But that sort of thing does happen. Have you talked to Erika?”
“No, she’s not back until next week.”
“Don’t do anything. I’ll call you back later,” Blomkvist said.
“Problems?” Salander asked.
“Millennium,” Blomkvist said. “I have to go there. Want to come along?”
The editorial offices were deserted. It took Salander three minutes to crack the password protection on Dahlman’s computer, and another two minutes to transfer its contents to Blomkvist’s iBook.
Most of Dahlman’s emails were probably on his own laptop, and they did not have access to it. But through his desktop computer at Millennium, Salander was able to discover that Dahlman had a Hotmail account in addition to his millennium.se address. It took her six minutes to crack the code and download his correspondence from the past year. Five minutes later Blomkvist had evidence that Dahlman had leaked information about the situation at Millennium and kept the editor of Monopoly Financial Magazine updated on which stories Berger was planning for which issues. The spying had been going on at least since the previous autumn.
They turned off the computers and went back to Mikael’s apartment to sleep for a few hours. He called Christer Malm at 10:00 a.m.
“I have proof that Dahlman is working for Wennerström.”
“I knew it. Great, I’m going to fire that fucking pig today.”
“No, don’t. Don’t do anything at all.”
“Nothing?”
“Christer, trust me. Is Dahlman still on holiday?”
“Yes, he’s back on Monday.”
“How many are
in the office today?”
“Well, about half.”
“Can you call a meeting for 2:00? Don’t say what it’s about. I’m coming over.”
There were six people around the conference table. Malm looked tired. Cortez looked like someone newly in love, the way that only twenty-four-year-olds can look. Nilsson looked on edge—Malm had not told anyone what the meeting was about, but she had been with the company long enough to know that something out of the ordinary was going on, and she was annoyed that she had been kept out of the loop. The only one who looked the same as usual was the part-timer Ingela Oskarsson, who worked two days a week dealing with simple administrative tasks, the subscriber list and the like; she had not looked truly relaxed since she became a mother two years ago. The other part-timer was the freelance reporter Lotta Karim, who had a contract similar to Cortez’s and had just started back to work after her holiday. Malm had also managed to get Magnusson to come in, although he was still on holiday.
Blomkvist began by greeting everyone warmly and apologising for being so long absent.
“What we’re going to discuss today is something that Christer and I haven’t taken up with Erika, but I can assure you that in this case I speak for her too. Today we’re going to determine Millennium’s future.”
He paused to let the words sink in. No-one asked any questions.
“The past year has been rough. I’m surprised and proud that none of you has reconsidered and found a job somewhere else. I have to assume that either you’re stark raving mad or wonderfully loyal and actually enjoy working on this magazine. That’s why I’m going to lay the cards on the table and ask you for one last effort.”
“One last effort?” Nilsson said. “That sounds as if you’re thinking of shutting down the magazine.”
“Exactly, Monika,” Blomkvist said. “And thank you for that. When she gets back Erika is going to gather us all together for a gloomy editorial meeting and to tell us that Millennium will fold at Christmas and that you’re all fired.”
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle Page 47
