The Girl Who Lived Twice

by David Lagercrantz

28.viii

  Blomkvist had never wanted to die, not in the way Forsell longed for death on Everest. He had never even been in a major crisis. But now as he lay on that stretcher, with severe burns to his legs and feet, he wanted to fade away and disappear. Nothing existed but his pain, and he was not even able to scream. His body was in cramp and his jaws were clenched, and he could not conceive that things could get any worse. But they could.

  The man in the white suit, who had introduced himself as Ivan, picked up a scalpel lying on the table beside him and cut into Blomkvist’s burns, and then he arched up into a bridge and screamed. He howled and screamed until he was drawn back into the conscious world. But it was a while before he realised what had happened, and he was only vaguely aware of more footsteps approaching, the click of heels this time. He twisted his head and saw a woman with strawberry-blonde hair and a face of unearthly beauty. She smiled, and that should perhaps have given him hope of some sort of relief. Instead he felt only a greater terror.

  “You …” he forced out.

  “Me,” she said.

  Camilla stroked his forehead and hair. Blomkvist flinched at her touch.

  “Hello,” she said.

  Blomkvist did not answer. His whole being was one screaming wound. And yet … his thoughts raced, as if he had something important to tell her.

  “Lisbeth worries me,” she said. “You should be worried about her too, Mikael. The clock is ticking. Tick, tock. But you’ve probably lost track of time, haven’t you? I can tell you that it’s already gone eleven, and Lisbeth would have been in touch by now if she wanted to help you. But we haven’t heard a word.”

  She smiled again.

  “Maybe she’s not all that keen on you after all, Mikael. Perhaps she’s jealous of all your other women. Of your little Catrin.”

  He shuddered.

  “What have you done to her?”

  “Nothing, my dear, nothing. Nothing yet. But it looks as if Lisbeth would rather see you dead than cooperate with us. She’s sacrificing you – the same way she’s sacrificed so many others.”

  Blomkvist closed his eyes and tried to trawl his mind for something he knew he wanted to say, but all that was there was his pain.

  “It’s you who are sacrificing me,” he said. “Not Lisbeth.”

  “Us? No, no, Lisbeth was made an offer which she did not accept, and I have nothing against that. I’ll be happy for her to discover what it feels like to lose someone you’re close to. Weren’t you important to her once?”

  Again she ran her hand over his hair, and in that second he saw something unexpected in Camilla’s face. He saw a similarity to Salander, not in appearance maybe, rather the speechless rage in her eyes, and he managed to stammer:

  “The ones …”

  He struggled to master the pain.

  “What, Mikael?”

  “… who mattered to her were her mother, and Holger, and she’s already lost them,” he said, and in that moment he realised what he had been searching for.

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “That Lisbeth knows perfectly well what it is to lose someone close, while you, Camilla—”

  “While I …”

  “… lost something worse.”

  “And what would that be?”

  He spat it out through gritted teeth:

  “A piece of yourself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Fury flashed in her eyes.

  “You lost both your mother and your father. A mother who did not want to see what was being done to you, and a father … you loved … but who took advantage of you, and I believe—”

  “What the hell do you believe?”

  He shut his eyes and tried grimly to focus.

  “That you became the biggest victim in the family. Everyone let you down.”

  Camilla grabbed him by the throat:

  “What has Lisbeth put into your head?”

  He was having trouble breathing, not only because of Camilla’s hand. It felt as if the fire was creeping closer and he was sure that he had made a mistake. He had wanted to awaken something inside her. But he had only managed to provoke her fury.

  “Answer me!” she yelled.

  “Lisbeth has said that …”

  He gasped for breath.

  “What?”

  “That she should have understood why Zala came to you at night, but she was so focused on protecting her mother that it didn’t register.”

  Camilla took her hands from his throat and kicked the stretcher so that his feet hit the side of the furnace.

  “Is that what she told you?”

  His pulse was racing.

  “She didn’t understand.”

  “Bullshit! She knew all along, of course she did,” Camilla shouted.

  “Calm down, Kira,” Galinov said.

  “Never,” she hissed. “Lisbeth’s been telling him barefaced lies.”

  “She didn’t know,” Mikael stuttered.

  “So that’s what she’s saying? Do you want to know what really happened with Zala? Do you? Zala made me a woman. That’s what he always said.” Camilla hesitated and seemed to be searching for words. “He made me a woman, just as I’m making a man of you now, Mikael,” she said, leaning forward and looking straight at him, and if at first there had been only rage and revenge in her eyes, now they changed.

  There was a glimpse of something vulnerable there, and he imagined that a connection had formed between them, perhaps she recognised something of herself in his defencelessness. But he could have been mistaken. The very next second she turned and walked out, shouting something in Russian that sounded like an order.

  Now Blomkvist was alone with the man whom he knew only as Ivan, and all he could do was try to endure, and not look into the flames.

  13.v.2008

  When Klara saw the climbers in the snowy fog, she collapsed and rolled down the slope, away from Nima Rita, and fell against a body lying there, a man. Was he dead? No, no, he was alive, he moved. He looked at her, and shook his head. He was wearing an oxygen mask. She could not see who it was. But he patted her shoulder.

  Then he took off his mask and sunglasses and when his eyes smiled at her, she smiled back, or at least she tried to. But not for long – soon she heard an argument going on over their heads. She caught only fragments. It was to do with everything Johannes – did they really say Johannes? – had done for Nima, and still would do. Build a house. Take care of Luna. But she could make no sense of this.

  She was in so much pain. She just lay there in the snow, helpless, she could not get up and she prayed to God that Nima would help her again and yes, there he now was, bending over her, and it felt as if the whole world were reaching down. She was going to be safe. She would go home, see her daughter again. But Nima did not pull her to her feet.

  It was the other man, and at first she was not unduly worried. They were just picking him up first. She looked up to see the man draped over Nima, just as she had been hanging over his back before, and she thought that the other person there would help her, the one who had been shouting at Nima. But the minutes went by and then something deeply worrying happened. They staggered away from her. They couldn’t be leaving her behind, could they?

  “No,” she screamed. “Don’t leave me, please!”

  But they did leave, without looking back, and she stared at their backs disappearing into the storm, and only once she was left with nothing but the sound of their creaking footsteps did the sheer terror of it strike her, and she shrieked until she had no more strength and all she could do was sob quietly, in a despair that she had never imagined possible.

  *

  Jurij Bogdanov was sitting in a newly built annexe opposite Kira, who had settled into a leather armchair and was nervously sipping an exquisite white Burgundy which had been sent for her benefit.

  Bogdanov’s eyes were fixed on his computer. He had to keep track of a whole series of video sequences, not only the one showing Blomk
vist writhing in pain, but also coverage of the surrounding countryside.

  The building was a glassworks, now disused, which had produced high-quality vases and bowls until it went bust a few years ago, when Kira bought it. It was in an isolated spot far from any built-up area, close to the edge of the forest, and even though the windows were large and tall, it was impossible to see through them; Bogdanov had been obsessive in ensuring they took every precaution. They ought to be safe here. But he was nevertheless not entirely confident, and his thoughts went to Wasp and what he had heard about her. She was said to have got into the N.S.A.’s intranet and read things that not even the President had been allowed to see. She had succeeded in doing what was considered impossible, and in his world she was a legend, whereas Kira … well, what about Kira?

  Bogdanov looked over to where she was sitting, beautiful Kira who had picked him out of the gutter and made him rich. He should be feeling nothing but gratitude towards her, and yet – and he felt it like a sudden weight in his body – he was tired of her. He was fed up with her threats and blows, her thirst for revenge, and so, without quite knowing why, he went to the e-mail address he had created and paused for a few seconds, feeling a strange sense of excitement in his body.

  Then he typed in the G.P.S. coordinates.

  If they couldn’t track down Wasp, she would have to come to them.

  Salander had pulled into another rest area, not far from Eskesta on the E4, and was sitting there with her laptop when a car stopped by the side of the road. It was a black Volvo V90 and that made her start and reach for the weapon under her jacket. But it was only a middle-aged couple with a small boy who needed to get out to pee.

  Salander went back to her screen. Plague had just sent her a message containing … well, it was nothing like a breakthrough, not remotely, but still, a new direction, to the east.

  Just as she had been hoping, that idiot from Svavelsjö, Peter Kovic, had screwed up and got caught on a surveillance camera at a service station on Industrigatan in Rocknö, north of Tierp, at 3.37 that morning. He looked like shit. Big and wet and bloated. In the video footage he could be seen removing his helmet and drinking from a silver-coloured water bottle, before he poured the rest over his hair and face. Probably trying to recover from the mother and father of a hangover.

  She wrote back:

 

  Plague answered:

 

 

 

  That pissed-up buffoon could have gone anywhere. Either inland, into the depths of Norrland, or up towards the coast. And she had no fucking clue where they had taken Blomkvist. She felt like screaming and hitting out. But she controlled herself and sat there wondering if it would be worth contacting the bastards, seeing if that would help her work something out. She went into the e-mail account she had been given and discovered something new: two lines of numbers and letters she could not make sense of at first. Then she saw that they were G.P.S. coordinates, of a place in the Uppland parish of Morgonsala.

  Morgonsala.

  What did that mean? Last time, they had summoned her to a place outside Sunnersta, with incredibly detailed instructions on how to get there. Now, no directions, not a single word, just a reference to a position located … where? … she had a closer look – somewhere in the sticks, in the middle of a field. She saw that Morgonsala was a small community with sixty-eight inhabitants, north-east of Tierp, consisting mainly of forest and plains. There was a church, of course, and some ancient ruins as well as a few abandoned industrial sites from the ’70s and ’80s, when the district was humming with entrepreneurial spirit. She thought that looked quite promising, and when she put the coordinates into Google Earth she discovered a long, rectangular brick building with large glass windows standing in the middle of a field, not far from the forest.

  Just about any building in Sweden could be a hiding place for criminals, there was a whole country to search through. Why point straight at that one? Why send her any coordinates at all? Was it a red herring? A trap?

  She looked again at the map and saw that Rocknö, where Kovic had stopped at the service station, was right by the turn-off to Morgonsala.

  Had one of Camilla’s lot squealed? Was that conceivable? Admittedly, it couldn’t have been a popular move to order the Svavelsjö crew to go after someone like Blomkvist. It would have seemed too risky, but why leak the information to her? What were they hoping for in return?

  It made no sense. She wrote to Plague:

 

 

  She sent him the G.P.S. coordinates and wrote:

 

 

 

 

 

  Then she got on her motorcycle and rode at a reckless speed to Morgonsala. Before long she noticed the wind growing stronger. The sky was clouding over and she gripped the handlebars so tightly that her fingers whitened inside her gloves.

  CHAPTER 32

  28.viii

  Ivan Galinov looked down at the journalist on the stretcher. What a fighter. He had not for a long time seen anyone go through this level of pain with such stoicism. But that did not help now. Time was passing and they could wait no longer. The journalist had to die – perhaps in vain, but it no longer mattered. For better or for worse, Galinov thought, here he now was, driven by the shadows of the past. By the fire itself, one could say.

  Unlike so many of his colleagues at the G.R.U., Galinov had not applauded when Zalachenko’s twelve-year-old daughter threw a Molotov cocktail into his car and watched him burn. Instead he had withdrawn, and sworn to go after that girl one day. There was no denying that he had been floored all those years ago when he heard that Zalachenko, his closest friend and mentor, had defected and become the worst of the worst, a traitor to his country.

  But later he realised it was not that simple, and they had reconnected, picking up more or less where they left off. They met in secret to exchange information, and they built up Zvezda Bratva together. Nobody, not even his own father, had meant as much to him as Zalachenko. Galinov would always honour his memory, in spite of the fact that he knew Zala had been the author of so much evil, not only in his profession but in other ways too, against his own flesh and blood, for instance. And that was another aspect of the drama that had brought him here.

  He would do anything for Kira. He saw in her both Zala and himself, both the traitor and the betrayed, both the victim and the one inflicting the pain, and he had never seen her as distraught as she was after speaking to Blomkvist on the stretcher.

  Galinov drew himself up. It was afternoon by now, his body was tired and his eyes were stinging. But here he was and he had to finish off the job. He had never enjoyed this kind of work, not like Kira or Zala. For him it was only a duty.

  “Let’s get this over with, Mikael,” he said. “You’ll manage just fine.”

  Blomkvist did not reply. He just clenched his jaws and steeled himself. The stretcher he was lying on was soaked in sweat. His feet were badly burned and gashed and there was a steady blaze in the furnace, like a gaping monster in front of him. Galinov had no trouble imagining himself in Blomkvist’s position.

  He had himself been tortured and at one point was certain that he was going to be executed. As some sort of comfort both for him and for Blomkvist, he believed there must be a limit to extreme pain, a moment when the body closes down. There was no evolutionary point in limitless suffering, especially when all hope was gone.

  “Are you ready?” he said.

  “I … have …” the journalist said, but he had evidently reached that limit because nothing more was heard.

  Galinov checked the stretcher would still roll freely and wiped the sweat from his cheeks. He caught a gli
mpse of himself in the metal frame of the furnace and readied himself.

  Blomkvist would have liked to say just about anything, if only to buy himself some respite. But his strength was gone and now memories and thoughts washed over him like a tidal wave. He saw his daughter before him, and his parents and Lisbeth and Erika, it was far more than he could take in, and he felt his back arching. His legs and hips were shaking and he realised, this is it, I am going to burn alive, and he tried to look up at Galinov but everything was blurred.

  The whole room seemed hazy, he couldn’t tell if the lights really were starting to blink and go out, or if he was hallucinating. For a while he thought that the darkness was a part of his mortal terror. But then he heard footsteps and voices, and saw Galinov turn and say in Swedish:

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  Several agitated voices answered. What was it? Blomkvist only knew that there was a sudden commotion in the building, that the electricity seemed to have failed. Everything had gone out except the furnace, which still burned with the same menacing intensity, leaving him one push away from an agonising death. But all this uproar must mean … that there was hope, surely. He looked around and saw shadowy figures moving in the dark.

  Perhaps the police had arrived, and he tried to think and to rise above the pain. Was there anything he could do to frighten them more? Tell them they were surrounded? But no, that might make them shove him into the oven even faster. His throat tightened. He could barely breathe. He looked down at the leather straps across his legs. The heat of the furnace had scorched them, searing them into his skin. A savage pain cut through his throbbing calves. His skin was in shreds, and yet … maybe he could tear himself free? It would be excruciatingly painful. But there was no time to think about that now. He closed his eyes and with difficulty said:

  “Holy shit, the ceiling’s coming down!”

  Galinov looked up, and Blomkvist took a deep breath and yanked his legs out of the straps with a monumental bellow that cut through the air. Without even thinking, he swung the lower half of his body and kicked the man in the stomach, and then everything went skewed and blurry. The last thing he remembered before he blacked out was the sound of voices shouting: