The Girl Who Lived Twice

by David Lagercrantz

  She could not shoot, and Galinov and Camilla dared to move forward, each from a different direction, Galinov bleeding and stunned and Camilla shaking with fury. For a few seconds Camilla glared at Salander, her eyes full of hatred and something like madness. Then suddenly, as if wanting to be shot, she ran straight at her sister. But Salander did not fire at her – not this time either.

  Instead she fell backwards and banged her head on the bricks close to the furnace. Galinov ran to her, took hold of her. A man lying further away lumbered to his feet. Once again, it looked to be the end for them.

  CHAPTER 34

  28.viii

  “I was growing more and more desperate at the time, and it wasn’t just fear,” Forsell said. “It was also the self-contempt. Lindberg was not only threatening me. He also managed to distort my whole perception of myself. The accusations he claimed to have against me seeped into my veins, and I started to feel like someone who doesn’t deserve to live. I mentioned all the hate in the media a little while ago. I never paid much attention to it. But after the exchange with Lindberg in his car, everything that had been said seemed true and real, as if in fact it were a part of me, and I couldn’t handle it anymore. I just lay in bed on Sandön, paralysed.”

  “And yet I heard you yelling into the telephone,” Rebecka said. “You still seemed prepared to fight.”

  “That’s true, I did want to fight. I had rung Janek here, and told him, and often I had the telephone in my hand and was on the point of calling the prime minister and the head of police. I was getting ready to take some sort of action. At least that’s what I’d like to believe. And it must have worried Lindberg when I took time off. He came out to Sandön. Looking back on it, I wonder if he didn’t do that just to keep an eye on me.”

  “Why do you say that?” Lindås said.

  “Because one morning, when Becka had gone shopping, he turned up unannounced and we stood on the beach and talked. That’s when he showed me the dossier. It was all fake, but it was quite uncanny how well it had been put together, with pictures of women who’d been beaten black and blue and witness statements, copies of reports to the police and supporting evidence, certificates which looked like proper scientific or technical proof. It was a comprehensive set of documents, clearly the work of professionals, and I realised at once that enough people would be taken in by it for long enough to cause irreparable damage. I remember walking back into the house and looking around. Every object in there – every kitchen knife, the upstairs windows, the plug sockets – had turned into something with which to injure myself. At that moment, I wanted only to die.”

  “Not quite, I don’t think, Johannes,” Kowalski said. “You still had some fight left in you. You called me again and told me everything.”

  “That’s true, I did.”

  “And you provided enough information for us to be able to confirm that Svante Lindberg had been recruited by Zvezda Bratva early in the 2000s. Not only did we realise that he was corrupt through and through, we also finally understood what had really happened.”

  “That he drugged Grankin and Klara Engelman?”

  “We knew exactly what his motives were all along. Just like Stan Engelman, he was deeply concerned about what Klara and Viktor could reveal. We don’t believe that Grankin knew about Lindberg’s role in the syndicate, but that’s not so important. Once you’ve been sucked into an organisation like that, you do as you’re told. By this time, Zvezda Bratva had every reason to get rid of Viktor and Klara.”

  “I’m beginning to understand,” Lindås said.

  “Then you’ll appreciate that Lindberg had more than one reason to leave Klara up there to die – it wasn’t only to help a friend.”

  “He wanted to silence her.”

  “Her rising from the dead meant that the syndicate was once again in danger. But the sad thing was that we were so focused on the material we had, we forgot to keep Johannes in the picture.”

  “You left him in the lurch,” Rebecka said.

  “We forgot to give him the support he deserved, and that pains me deeply.”

  “I should hope so too.”

  “You’re absolutely right. It was very regrettable and unfair, and I hope that’s what you think too, Catrin, having listened to all this.”

  “What?” she said.

  “That all along, Johannes was only trying to do the right thing.”

  Lindås did not answer. She was staring at a news flash on her mobile.

  “Has something happened?” Rebecka said.

  “There’s a police operation going on in Morgonsala, it may be something to do with Mikael,” she said.

  Salander’s head banged against the brick wall, and she could feel the rush of heat from the furnace. She knew she had to get a grip on herself, and not only for her own sake. What the hell was her problem? She could burn men with irons. She could tattoo words onto their bellies. She could go completely wild. But she could not shoot her sister – not if her own life depended on it.

  She had hesitated once more, and now, in the midst of the whirling madness around them, Camilla grabbed hold of her injured arm and tried to drag her towards the furnace. Her hair hissed as the fire singed it, and she was close to falling into the flames. But she stayed upright and saw how one man, Jorma she thought it was, was aiming a pistol at her from across the room. She shot back and hit him in the chest. There was movement and danger on all sides, and now Galinov bent to pick a weapon off the floor, and she was about to shoot him as well. But she did not have time.

  Blomkvist collapsed, grimacing with pain, but in his fall he managed to grab hold of Galinov’s shoulder. Just then Camilla took a step back and stared at Salander with a hatred that knew no bounds. Her whole body was shaking as she braced herself. She rushed forward to shove her into the furnace. But Salander stepped to one side, and Camilla’s own momentum carried her forward. It was over in no time at all.

  Yet it seemed to take for ever. Not just the movement itself and the fall and the flailing hands. It was also the crashing sound, the noise of her body landing in the flames, the sizzle of scorched skin and her hair catching fire, and the screaming that followed and was stifled by the blaze and her desperate effort to get out, and then the first staggering steps back onto the floor, her hair and blouse ablaze.

  Camilla howled and shook her head, writhing in agony, while Salander just stood there motionless, observing the scene. For a brief moment she wondered if she should help her sister. But she remained immobile, and something else happened instead. Camilla fell silent, paralysed. She must have caught sight of her own reflection in the metal frame of the furnace, because suddenly she started screaming again:

  “My face, my face!”

  It was as if she had lost something more precious than life itself. Yet somehow she was still able to act. She bent down, picked up the weapon Galinov had dropped and aimed it at her sister, and that galvanised Salander. Now she was prepared to shoot back.

  Camilla’s hair was still burning, which had to be affecting her vision. She stumbled around with the pistol held high, and Salander had her finger on the trigger of her gun, ready to fire. For a split second she thought she had. A shot went off. But it was not from her own pistol.

  It was from Camilla’s. She had shot herself in the head and, without realising what she was doing, Salander held out a hand and was about to say something. But whatever it was, it remained unsaid. Camilla crumpled and Salander stood and looked down at her sister while a whole world flashed by in her thoughts, a world engulfed by fire and destruction.

  She thought of her mother, and of Zala burning in his Mercedes, and soon after that the hammering of a helicopter’s blades could be heard overhead and she looked down at Blomkvist, still lying on the floor, not far from Camilla and Galinov.

  “Is it over?” he mumbled.

  “It’s over,” she said, and at the same moment she heard the police shouting outside as they approached the building.

  CHAPTER 35


  28.viii

  Bublanski – or Officer Bubble as he was sometimes known – was walking in the field in front of the old glassworks. There were policemen and medical personnel all over the place. A T.V. crew was broadcasting live, and he was informed that Blomkvist and many of the injured had already been taken away. But to his surprise he caught sight of a familiar outline sitting inside an ambulance a little way off.

  The doors were open and the figure was covered in cuts and dirt, and had singed hair and a bandaged arm. She was staring blankly at a stretcher being carried away from the building, on it a body wrapped in a grey blanket. Bublanski approached hesitantly.

  “Lisbeth … how are you?” he said.

  She did not answer. She did not even look at him, and so he continued:

  “We have you to thank. Without you—”

  “This wouldn’t have happened,” she cut in.

  “Don’t be hard on yourself. Dare I ask you to promise—”

  “I’m not promising anything,” she said in a voice which frightened him. He thought again of the fallen angel in paradise: serves nobody, belongs to nobody, and he smiled self-consciously and urged the ambulance crew to take her to hospital as quickly as possible.

  He turned to Sonja Modig, who was walking across the field towards him, and for the thousandth time he thought that he was too old for this sort of madness. He longed for the sea, or for anywhere at all which was peaceful and lay far away.

  They sat there glued to their mobiles. Someone was reporting live on national television that Blomkvist and Salander had been carried out of the building, injured but conscious, and Lindås felt the tears welling up in her eyes. Her hands shook and she stared emptily ahead. She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  “It looks as if they’re going to make it,” Kowalski said.

  “Let’s hope so,” she said, wondering if she had not better leave at once.

  But then she realised that she would not be able to help at all at this stage. She might as well finish what she had started, and there was still one question which needed to be answered.

  “I should imagine that people will sympathise with your predicament, Johannes, at least those who want to understand,” she said.

  “There aren’t usually too many of those,” Rebecka said.

  “Nothing I can do about that now,” Forsell said. “Can we drop you off somewhere, Catrin?”

  “I’ll be alright, thanks,” she said. “But there’s one more thing I’d like to ask you. You said you didn’t visit Nima Rita all that often at the South Wing. But you went there a few times, didn’t you, and surely you must have noticed that he wasn’t doing well?”

  “I did.”

  “So why didn’t you ask for something to be done? Why didn’t you see to it that he was moved to a better place?”

  “I insisted on all sorts of things. I even yelled at the people there. But not enough, I suppose, and perhaps I gave up too easily. I ran away from it. Maybe it was more than I could handle.”

  “In what way?”

  “We all have things we can’t deal with,” he said. “In the end you just look away and pretend they’re not happening.”

  “Was it that bad?”

  “To begin with, I was there quite often. Then I waited for almost a year. It just turned out that way, and I remember feeling nervous and uncomfortable when I went back. He came shuffling towards me, wearing grey clothes. He looked like a prisoner who had been crushed. I got to my feet and put my arms around him, but his body was stiff and lifeless. I tried to talk. I asked him endless questions. His answers were monosyllabic. He seemed to have given up, and I had a violent reaction. I felt this tremendous rage.”

  “Towards the clinic?”

  “Towards him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That’s how it was, quite simply, guilt can do that to you. It ends up breeding a load of anger. Nima was like … the flip side of me. He was the price I had paid for having such a happy life.”

  “Can you explain that?” Lindås said.

  “Don’t you understand? I owed him a debt I could never repay. I couldn’t even thank him without going back to the very thing that had torn him apart. I was alive because Klara had been sacrificed. Because he had been sacrificed, and in the end his wife too, and I couldn’t bear it. I never went back to the South Wing. I looked away.”

  CHAPTER 36

  9.ix

  Berger shook her head again. No, she said, she had no idea how it had all happened, but she made it clear that she did not like their choice of words. She’s not some Little Miss Perfect or tone-deaf moralist. She’s actually damned good. She writes with passion and power, and you should be proud instead of whingeing, so get out of here and do some work.

  “Now,” she said.

  “Yes, yes,” they mumbled. “We just thought—”

  “What did you think?”

  “Oh, forget it.”

  The two young reporters, Sten Åström and Freddie Welander, slunk out of her office and she sent them on their way with a few more angry words. But sometimes she wondered too, there was no denying it. How the hell had it come about? It was the unexpected consequence of a romance, a night at a hotel, that much she knew, but still … Catrin Lindås.

  She was the last person on earth Berger would have expected to find writing for Millennium. But Lindås had delivered a staggering disclosure, her story borne along by a raw fervour, and before it had even been published, Defence Minister Forsell had resigned and his under-secretary, Svante Lindberg, had been arrested, there being reasonable grounds to suspect him of murder, blackmail and aggravated espionage. Yet none of the information that had already trickled out into the media and caused banner headlines, day after day, hour by hour, had robbed the magazine of its kudos or dampened eager expectations for the latest edition.

  “In view of the revelations to be published in the next issue of Millennium, I will be resigning my position in the government,” Forsell had vouchsafed in his press release.

  It was nothing short of fantastic, and the fact that some of her own staff were unable to rejoice at their success, but felt it necessary to rubbish the person who had delivered the scoop, only went to show how envious journalists can be. They also complained about having to cooperate with the German magazine Geo, in which a Paulina Müller, a writer none of them had ever heard of, had written an article about the scientific work which had helped to identify the Sherpa Nima Rita.

  Blomkvist himself had not written a single line, although he had of course done the groundwork. He had spent most of the time lying in a daze of morphine, coping with the pain and a series of operations. The doctors had been reassuring: he would probably be able to walk normally again within half a year, and that was a great relief. Yet he remained taciturn and downhearted and only occasionally, as when they were discussing her divorce, did he sound like his old self again. He had laughed when she told him that she was having a romance with a man called Mikael.

  “How convenient,” he had said. But he did not want to talk about himself or his ordeal.

  He was bottling up his suffering and she worried about him. With any luck he would open up a little today. He was going to be allowed home, and she thought she would visit him that evening. But first she was going to look through his story about troll factories, which he had not wanted to publish and had only reluctantly sent her. She put on her spectacles and started reading. O.K., not a bad beginning, all things considered, she thought. He did know how to write an introduction, but then … she could understand why he had not been happy with it.

  It sagged. He was being too complicated. He was trying to say too much at once, and she went to get herself some coffee before crossing out a sentence here and there. But then … what on earth was this? Towards the end of the article there was a clumsy addition which said that a man called Vladimir Kuznetsov not only owned troll factories in Russia, but was ultimately responsible for them. He was also the man
behind the hate campaign which had preceded the murders of L.G.B.T.Q. people in Chechnya, and that was not previously known.

  She checked. No, all she could find on the net about Kuznetsov was almost … endearing. He was apparently a restaurateur and a bit of a character, an ice-hockey fan who also specialised in cooking bear steak and organising lavish parties for the ruling elite. But Blomkvist’s article said something very different. It identified him as the person who had launched the disinformation and hacker attacks that triggered the stock market crash that summer. He was the driving force behind a large proportion of the lies and hatred spreading across the world. How sensational was that? And what the hell was Blomkvist playing at? How could he hide that kind of revelation deep inside the story, and dish it up without a shred of evidence?

  Berger read the piece again and saw that Kuznetsov’s name contained a link to a number of documents in Russian and so she called over Irina, their editor and researcher who had helped Blomkvist earlier that summer. Irina was stocky, with large horn-rimmed spectacles and a crooked, warm smile. Immediately she settled down on Berger’s chair and immersed herself in the material, translating it aloud, and at the end they looked at each other and murmured:

  “Bloody hell.”

  Blomkvist had just made it back to his apartment on Bellmansgatan on crutches, and could not understand what Berger was going on about on the telephone. But then he was not particularly alert. He was full of morphine and his head was heavy, and he was haunted by flashbacks.

  At first Salander had been there with him at the hospital, which had lent him a degree of calm; perhaps he felt better with a person by his side who knew exactly what he had been through. But just as he was getting used to having her around, she left without a word of goodbye. There was uproar, of course. The doctors and nurses ran around looking for her, as did Bublanski and Modig, who had not finished questioning her as a witness. As if that made any difference to her.