The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle (104 page)

Salander frowned. She knew that was false, and wondered what game
Millennium
was playing. Then she understood the message and smiled her second lopsided smile of the day. She connected to the server in Holland and double-clicked on the
MikBlom/laptop
icon. She found the folder and the document [To Sally] prominently displayed in the middle of the desktop. She double-clicked and read it.

Then she sat for a long time staring at Blomkvist's letter. She wrestled with contradictory feelings. Up until then it had been her against the rest of Sweden, which in its simplicity was quite an elegant and lucid equation. Now suddenly she had an ally, or at least a potential ally, who claimed to believe she was innocent. And of course it would be the only man in Sweden that she never wanted to see again under any circumstances. She sighed. Blomkvist was, as always, a naive do-gooder. Salander hadn't been innocent since the age of ten.

There are no innocents. There are
,
however
,
different degrees of responsibility
.

Bjurman was dead because he had chosen not to play according to the rules she had stipulated. He had had every chance, but still he had hired some fucking alpha male to do her harm. That was not her responsibility.

But Kalle Blomkvist's involvement should not be underrated. He could be useful.

He was good at riddles and he was unmatchably stubborn. She had found that out in Hedestad. When he sank his teeth into something he simply would not let go. He really was naive. But he could move in places where she couldn't. He might be useful until she could get safely out of the country. Which was what she assumed she would soon be forced to do.

Unfortunately, Blomkvist could not be controlled. He needed a reason of his own to act. And he needed a moral excuse as well.

In other words, he was quite predictable. She thought for a while and then created a new document called [To MikBlom] and wrote a single word.

That would give him something to think about.

She was still sitting there thinking when she noticed that Blomkvist had booted up his computer. His reply came shortly after he read her message:

OK. Time to hook him.

She created another document and called it [Kalle Blomkvist]. She knew that would upset him. Then she wrote a brief message:

As expected, he replied at once with an appeal for her to listen to reason, and he tried to play on her feelings. She smiled and closed her connection to his hard drive.

•  •  •

Now that she had started snooping around, she moved on and opened Armansky's hard drive. She read the report about herself that he had written the day after Easter. It was not clear to whom the report was addressed, but she assumed that the only reasonable explanation was that Armansky was working with the police to help bring her in.

She spent a while going through Armansky's email, but found nothing of interest. Just as she was about to disconnect, she lit upon a message to the technical chief at Milton Security with instructions for the installation of a hidden surveillance camera in his office.

Bingo
.

She looked at the date and saw that the message was sent about an hour after her social call in February.

That meant she would have to adjust certain routines in the automatic surveillance system before she paid another visit to Armansky's office.

On Tuesday morning Salander accessed the police criminal register and looked up Alexander Zalachenko. He was not listed, which was not surprising, since as far as she knew he had never been convicted of a crime in Sweden and was not even in the national database.

When she had accessed the criminal register she used the identity of Superintendent Douglas Skiöld of the Malmö police. She got a mild shock when her computer suddenly pinged and an icon in the menu toolbar started blinking to signal that someone was looking for her in the ICQ chat programme.

Her first impulse was to pull the plug and shut down. Then she thought about it. Skiöld had not had the ICQ programme on his machine. Very few older people did.

Which meant that someone was looking for
her
. And there were not many alternatives to choose from. She clicked on ICQ and typed the words:

Salander hesitated. First Blomkvist and now Plague. Was there no end to all the people coming to her rescue? The problem with Plague was that he was a 350-pound recluse who communicated almost exclusively via the Internet and made Salander look like a miracle of social skills. When she didn't answer, Plague typed another line:

Lisbeth disconnected from ICQ and sat down on the sofa to think. Ten minutes later she sent an email to Plague's hotmail address.

She knew that Plague himself seldom left his apartment in Sundbyberg, so she hoped he had cultivated some pimply teenager to do the field work. There was no need to sign the message. She got an answer fifteen minutes later.

On Thursday morning she had one email from Plague containing an FTP address. Salander was amazed. She had not expected a result for at least two weeks. Doing a hostile takeover, even with Plague's brilliant programme and his specially designed hardware, was a laborious process that required slipping bits of information into a computer one kilobyte at a time until a simple piece of software had been created. How rapidly it could be done depended on how often Ekström used his computer, and then it should normally take another few days to transfer all the data to a mirrored hard drive. Forty-eight hours was not merely exceptional, it was theoretically impossible. Salander was impressed. She pinged his ICQ:

She thought for a moment and then transferred 30,000 kronor to Plague's account via the Internet. She did not want to frighten him off with excessive amounts. Then she made herself comfortable on her Verksam IKEA chair and opened Ekström's laptop.

Within an hour she had read all the reports that Inspector Bublanski had sent to Ekström. Salander suspected that, technically, reports like these were not allowed to leave police headquarters. It proved once again the theory that no security system is a match for a stupid employee. Through Ekström's computer she gleaned several important pieces of information.

First, she discovered that Armansky had assigned two of his staff to join Bublanski's investigative team without remuneration, which in practice meant that Milton Security was sponsoring the police hunt for her. Their assignment was to assist in the arrest of Salander by all possible means.
Thanks a lot
,
Armansky. I'll remember that
. She frowned when she discovered which employees they were. Bohman she had taken for a straight arrow, and he had been perfectly decent in his behaviour towards her. Hedström was a corrupt nobody who had exploited his position at Milton Security to swindle one of the company's clients.

Salander had a selective morality. She had nothing at all against swindling the company's clients herself—provided they deserved it—but if she had accepted a job with a confidentiality agreement in it, she would never have broken it.

Salander soon discovered that the person who had leaked the information to the media was Ekström himself. This was evident from an email in which he answered follow-up questions about both Salander's psychiatric report and the connection between her and Miriam Wu.

The third significant piece of information was the insight that Bublanski's team did not have a single lead as to where they should look for Salander. She read with interest a report on what measures had been taken and which addresses had been put under sporadic surveillance. It was a short list. Lundagatan, obviously, but also Blomkvist's address, Miriam's old address at St. Eriksplan, and Kvarnen, where they had been seen together.
Fuck
,
why did I have to involve Mimmi? What a mistake that was
.

On Friday Ekström's researchers had also found the link to Evil Fingers. She guessed that would mean more addresses being visited. She frowned. So the girls in the group would vanish from her circle of friends too, even though she had had no contact with them since her return to Sweden.

The more she thought about all this, the more confused she became. Ekström was leaking all kinds of bullshit to the media. His objective was clear. He was building publicity and doing the groundwork for the day when he would issue a charge against her.

But why hadn't he leaked the police report from 1991, which had led her to be locked up at St. Stefan's? Why keep that story hidden?

She went into Ekström's computer again and pored over his documents. When she was finished she lit a cigarette. She had not found a single
reference to the events of 1991 on his computer. It was strange, but the only explanation was that he didn't know about the police report.

For a moment she was at a loss. Then she glanced at her PowerBook. This was precisely the kind of thing that Kalle Fucking Blomkvist could sink his teeth into. She rebooted her computer to access his hard drive and created the document [MB2].

That should be enough to get him going. She sat patiently and waited two hours for Blomkvist to get online. He read his email and it took fifteen minutes before he noticed her document and another five minutes before he replied with the document [Cryptic]. He didn't bite. Instead he insisted that he wanted to know who murdered his friends.

That was an argument that Salander could understand. She softened a bit and answered with [Cryptic 2].

Which was intended as a personal question. He replied with [Cryptic 3]. It shook her.

Blomkvist's reference to Teleborian at first made her furious. Then she realized that he was not trying to start a fight. He had no idea who Teleborian was and had probably only seen him on TV, where he came across as a responsible, internationally respected expert.

But what really shook her was the reference to Wennerström's billions. She had no idea how he had wormed out that information. She was absolutely certain that she had made no mistakes and that nobody in the world could know what she had done.

She read the letter over several times.

The reference to friendship made her uncomfortable. She didn't know how to respond to it.

A short time later she created [Cryptic 4].

She disconnected and went to her window seat.

Salander had exhausted her supply of Billy's Pan Pizza as well as the last crumb of bread and rind of cheese. For the last three days she had survived on a packet of instant oats that she had bought on impulse with the vague idea that she ought to eat more nourishing food. She discovered that half a cup of oats with a few raisins and a cup of water turned into an edible portion of hot cereal after a minute in the microwave.

It was not only the lack of food that got her on the move. She had someone to look after. Unfortunately that was not something she could do while holed up in her apartment. She went to her wardrobe and took out the blond wig and Irene Nesser's Norwegian passport.