He had without doubt been a distinguished climber who had conquered many of the toughest summits in the world – K2, the Eiger, Annapurna, Denali, Cerro Torre … and then, of course, Everest. But there was little else in the way of hard information, only over and again the fact that he had worked as a consultant for adventure holidays. What exactly did that entail? Blomkvist did not find much, but eventually came across an old picture of Grankin together with the Russian businessman Andrei Koskov. Didn’t that name ring a bell?
Yes, of course, damn it. Koskov was a businessman and whistleblower in exile who in November 2011 had exposed connections between the Russian intelligence services and organised crime. Not long after that, in March 2012, he dropped dead while out walking in Camden, in London, and at first the police found nothing suspicious. Three months later, however, traces of Gelsemium elegans were detected in samples taken from his blood. Blomkvist found that this Asian dicotyledon plant is sometimes known as heartbreak grass – in concentrated form it can make the heart stop – and it was by no means an unknown poison. In 1879, none other than Arthur Conan Doyle had written about it in the British Medical Journal. But for a long time there was no mention of the plant in historical records or on the news until it shot to prominence again in 2012 when it was detected in the body of a defector, a G.R.U. agent by the name of Igor Popov, in Baltimore, U.S.A. Now Blomkvist was on the alert. Military intelligence, suspected deaths through poisoning, claims that Forsell had systematically investigated the activities of the G.R.U. and been thrown out of the country …
Was this another misleading coincidence, like the one with Mats Sabin, the military historian? After all, it was nothing more than a picture of Grankin posing with someone who had died in mysterious circumstances. But still … there could be no harm in checking with the confounded “Charles” and asking him what he knew. He sent off a text:
It was ten minutes before he got an answer:
Jesus, he thought. Jesus. Not that he took this at face value for one second. Nor would he until he knew who he was communicating with.
The reply came right back.
Within five minutes a photograph arrived showing an I.D. card for none other than Lieutenant Colonel Viktor Alexeievich Grankin, bearing the emblem used by the G.R.U. at the time, the red five-leaf clover on a black background. It seemed like solid information, for all that Blomkvist could tell.
“Bloody hell,” Blomkvist muttered out loud.
Was he being careless? He knew nothing about this man, save that he was well informed, and Blomkvist would need as many facts as possible before the meeting tomorrow morning. Surely a one-minute walk to the Grand Hôtel was a risk worth taking? It was 1.58 a.m. and there were still voices out in the street. The city was awake. There were always taxis queuing outside the Grand at night, as far as he could recall, and no doubt there were doormen too. No, surely, there could be no danger. He dressed quietly, left the room and took the lift to the lobby, then the curved stairs down to ground level. The street outside was wet from the downpour, but the dark sky was clearing.
It was good to get out. Lights were shining in the Royal Palace across the water and further away, in Kungsträdgården, there was life still and pockets of people. He was relieved to see a few individuals on the quay too, a young couple walking by. A waitress was clearing glasses from the outside tables, and a man in a white linen suit was still seated on a chair on the far side of the terrace bar, looking out at the water. All clear, he thought, and he set off. But then he heard a voice:
“Blomkvist?”
He turned and saw that it was the man in the white suit who had hailed him, a gentleman in his sixties with grey-white hair, handsome features and a cautious smile, perhaps even a smirk. What had amused him? Was it a quip about Blomkvist’s journalism, or character? If so, it was a quip he never got to share.
He heard steps behind him and felt his body jerk, as if electricity had shot through it. He collapsed and hit his head on the pavement, and the strange thing was, his first reaction was not one of fear or pain, but of anger. And not even anger at his assailant but at himself: how could he have been so bloody stupid? How could he? He tried to move. But another shock made him twitch as if he were having a seizure.
“My God, what’s the matter with him?”
This could have been the waitress.
“Looks like an epileptic fit. We need to call an ambulance.”
The man in the white suit spoke in a perfectly calm voice, and the footsteps faded away. Other people approached and Blomkvist heard the sound of a car engine. Then it all happened very quickly. He was rolled over onto a stretcher and lifted in. A door was shut, the vehicle moved away and he fell off the stretcher onto the floor. He tried to shout, but he was so stunned that he could only groan and not until the vehicle had crossed Hamngatan did he manage to utter the words that now came back to him.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?”
*
Salander was woken by sounds she could not identify and she fumbled drowsily for her weapon on the bedside table. But as she got hold of the pistol and swept the hotel room with its muzzle, she realised that the sound was coming from her mobile. Had she heard someone calling out?
Oddly it was a second or two before she came to the conclusion that it could only have been Blomkvist, and she closed her eyes, took a deep breath and tried to put her thoughts in some order. “Come on now,” she whispered. “Tell me you only happened to say those words. Come on.”
She turned up the volume on her mobile and listened to the banging and crackling. It could be nothing, just noises from a car or a train. But then she heard him groan, followed by heavy, pained breathing. Was he losing consciousness? She leaped out of bed, cursing, and sat at the desk.
Salander was still at the Nobis Hotel in Norrmalmstorg and had been keeping an eye on the address on Strandvägen all evening, ever since her attack on Conny Andersson. There had been a certain amount of activity and she had seen Galinov leave the building. But she had not been especially worried and had gone to sleep at around one – very recently, it would seem – hoping to have gained another day’s respite. She had been wrong.
On her computer she could see that Blomkvist was being taken north, out of Stockholm, and any minute now they would search his pockets and get rid of his mobile. If Galinov and Bogdanov were involved, they would know exactly how to cover their tracks, so she couldn’t afford to sit there like a fool and follow their progress on the map. She had to act. She rewound the tape and heard Blomkvist call out:
“What are you doing?”
He repeated the w
ords twice and was definitely in a bad way, in shock. All she could hear was his breathing. Had they drugged him? She banged her fist on the desk and registered that the vehicle had been on Norrlandsgatan, not far from where she was now. But that was unlikely to be where they had picked him up, so she wound the recording further back and heard his footsteps and his breathing, and a voice saying “Blomkvist?” – the voice of an older man, she thought. And after that a yelp, an exhalation of breath, and a woman shouting, “My God, what’s the matter with him?”
Where had all this taken place?
Blasieholmen, by the look of it. She could not determine the exact spot, but it must have been outside the Grand Hôtel or the Nationalmuseum, somewhere around there. She rang the emergency services and reported that the journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, had been assaulted in that neighbourhood. The young man who took the call recognised the name and asked for more details in an excited voice. But before Salander had time to add anything, someone in the background could be heard saying that an alert had already come in from that area: a man had collapsed, apparently having had some kind of fit outside Hotel Lydmar, and had been taken away.
“How?” she said.
There was confusion at the other end of the line, voices talking to each other.
“An ambulance fetched him?”
“An ambulance?”
For a split second she was relieved, but then she checked herself.
“Did you dispatch it?”
“I expect we did.”
“You ‘expect’ you did?”
“Let me check.”
Again, voices in the background, but it was difficult to catch what they were saying. Then the man was back on the line, clearly nervous.
“Who’s asking?”
“Salander,” she said. “Lisbeth Salander.”
“No, apparently we didn’t.”
“Well, have it stopped then,” she spat out. “Now.”
She yelled a stream of abuse, hung up and listened to the recording in real time. It was too quiet, she thought. Only the rumble of the vehicle and Blomkvist’s laboured breathing. There was nothing else to be heard, no other voices, but then … if it really was an ambulance that was a lead of sorts, and she considered ringing the police and raising hell. But no, unless the emergency centre was staffed by idiots, they must already be after it.
It was vital she acted before the tracking signals disappeared, and just then – in case she doubted the information she had received – a siren began to howl, and then something more: a scratching sound, hands searching through Blomkvist’s pockets, she thought, followed by movement and heavy breathing. Then a loud noise, a crunching crash, not a mobile being thrown away, but one being smashed to bits, and then the transmission died. It ended as suddenly as a gunshot, a power cut, and she kicked her chair. She grabbed her whisky glass from the table and hurled it at the wall where it broke into a thousand pieces.“Fucking hell … Fuck!”
She shook her head, pulled herself together and checked where Camilla was. Still at Strandvägen, of course. She wouldn’t get her hands dirty. Fuck her! She rang Plague and shouted at him as she pulled on her clothes and packed a rucksack with her laptop, her pistol and her I.M.S.I.-catcher. Then she kicked over a lamp, put on her helmet and Google Glass and rushed out to her motorcycle in the square.
Rebecka Forsell had asked to sleep on her own. She thought Kowalski and Johannes could perfectly well doss down together. But now she was lying awake in a narrow bed, in a small study crammed with books, reading the news on her mobile. Not a word about Johannes disappearing from hospital. She was glad she had called the hospital staff to say that she was looking after Johannes herself, as well as Klas Berg on a secure line. She had subsequently ignored his admonitions and threats. To be fair, Berg had no idea what a marginal player he was in the overall scheme of things.
She could not have cared less about him or any of the others at military high command. All she wanted was to be able to process the full implications of what she had heard, and maybe also to understand why she had not suspected anything earlier. There had been no shortage of signs, that much was clear to her now. For example, the crisis Johannes had gone through at Base Camp afterwards. She had cried tears of relief that he was alive, and safe – despite the tragedy that had befallen the others – and she could barely take in the enormity of his achievement. But he had not wanted to talk about it. All the snippets that had not meant anything at the time but which could now be pieced together to form a new whole. Like that evening in October almost three years ago, when the boys had gone to sleep and Johannes had just been appointed Minister of Defence. They were sitting in the sofa at home in Stocksund, and he mentioned Klara Engelman in a new, disturbing tone of voice.
“I keep wondering what she was thinking,” he said.
“When?”
“When she was abandoned.”
She answered that in all likelihood Klara was not thinking at all – that she was probably already dead. But now, in the night, Rebecka understood what Johannes had meant, and it was more than she could bear.
CHAPTER 28
13.v.2008
Klara Engelman was not thinking anything the first time she was abandoned. Her body temperature had dropped to twenty-eight degrees and her heartbeat was by then slow and irregular. She heard neither the disappearing footsteps nor the howling storm.
She was deeply unconscious, not aware that she had put an arm around Viktor or even that the body she was holding onto was his. Her organs were shutting down as a last form of defence, and she would soon be dead. By then there was no doubt, and that was perhaps, in a way, what she had wanted.
Her husband Stan made no secret of his contempt and cheated on her quite openly, their twelve-year-old, Juliette, was going through a crisis too, and Klara had run away from it all, taken herself off to Everest and put on a cheerful face, just as she always did. She was, in fact, suffering from severe depression, and it was only in the last week that she had found a reason to live again. It was not just her love for Viktor. She had also begun to hope that she could bring Stan down, once and for all.
She was feeling strong again, even as she headed towards the summit, and she had drunk plenty of that blueberry soup which she had heard was so good for one. But before long her body began to feel strangely heavy and her eyelids kept closing, and she felt colder and colder until finally she collapsed. She slipped away and was oblivious to the storm which now came raging in from the north, endangering the whole expedition. For her, the hours simply vanished into darkness, and silence, and she heard nothing until an ice axe started picking away at her face.
Not that she really grasped what was going on. There was just this hacking right by her, close to her and yet still remote, as if in another world. But then … her airways had become freer and the footsteps had disappeared, and she opened her eyes. It was a miracle, in a way. Klara, who had been given up for dead, looked around and had no idea what was going on. Except that she found herself in some sort of hell. But little by little things came back to her, and she looked at her legs and her boots and then at an arm, without quite being able to understand whose arm it was. It was frozen stiff above her hip in the air. Then she realised it was hers, and tried to move it. But it would not budge. Her body was frozen. Then something happened which got her to her feet.
She saw her daughter in front of her. She saw her as clearly as if she could reach out and touch her, and after four or five attempts she stood up and began to stumble downhill, like a sleepwalker with hands stretched in front of her, and even though she barely knew which was left and which was right, she was guided by howls, inhuman screams which seemed to be showing her the way. It was a long time before she realised that the screams were her own.
Nima Rita was in a landscape he had always believed to be inhabited by spirits and ghosts, so he took no notice of the screams. Go on, he thought, scream as much as you like. Why on earth had he come back up here? He could not believe
it himself. He had seen her and said his goodbyes. All hope was lost. But he also knew that he had listened too much to the others and had left behind the one person he should not have abandoned. Maybe he no longer cared whether he too went under or not. All that mattered was for him to show that he had not given up. If he died, he would die with dignity.
His exhaustion had taken him beyond all reason, he had frostbite and he could hardly see. He heard only the blizzard and the howling in the snowy fog. But he did not for even a second connect them to Mamsahib, and he was about to pause for a breath when the sound of creaking footsteps in the snow came ever closer.
Then he saw a ghost with its arms held out, as if beseeching the living to give it something, a piece of bread, some comfort, a prayer, and he approached the ghost. The next moment the figure fell into his arms with a surprising weight. They collapsed in the snow and rolled over, and he banged his head.
“Help me, help me, I have to get to my daughter,” the figure said, and then he knew.
He did not understand, it dawned on him gradually and in some confusion, and then a stab of joy shot through his exhausted body. It was her. It really was her, and that could only be because the mountain goddess was smiling on him. She must have seen how he had struggled, and with what pain. It would all be alright, he thought, so he gathered his remaining strength and put his arms around her waist and got her back onto her feet, and then they stumbled down together while she screamed and he increasingly lost his grip on reality.
His face was so strangely stiff. It was as if he were in another world, yet he was holding her up, wasn’t he? And he was battling. It was clear from the sound of his breathing that he was fighting furiously. She prayed to God that she would be allowed to go home to her daughter, and all the time she promised herself not to give up, not to collapse. Not now and not later. It would all work out, she thought.
The Girl Who Lived Twice Page 25
