The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series (44 page)

“Benjamin! Bring her here!”

Benjamin nodded. He was half a metre taller than Salander and twice as broad, so he didn’t seem to think he would have any trouble. But when he lunged at her, he was carried forward not only by the sheer mass of his body, but also by the downward slope of the steps. Salander stepped neatly to one side, took hold of the man’s left arm and tugged. At that moment Benjamin’s determination proved counterproductive. He went down head first on the stone landing, cracking his elbow on the way. Salander saw none of it. She was already hobbling up the stairs, shoving Greitz inside and locking the door behind them. Benjamin was soon hammering on the outside of the door.

Greitz backed away, clutching her brown leather bag. In a few seconds she had regained the upper hand, but that had nothing to do with the bag or its contents: Salander had expended so much energy on the stairs that her dizziness almost overwhelmed her. She looked around the apartment through half-closed eyes, and although her vision was hardly clear, she knew she had never seen anything like it. Not only was the place devoid of all colour – everything was either black or white – it was also dazzlingly clean and clinical, as if a household robot lived there rather than a human being. There cannot have been a speck of dust in the entire apartment. Salander steadied herself against a black chest of drawers. Just as she was about to pass out, she saw from the corner of her eye Greitz advancing towards her, holding something in her hand. A syringe.

“I’ve just been hearing how you like to stick needles into people,” Salander said. Greitz attacked, but to no avail. Salander kicked the syringe out of her hand, and it fell onto the shiny white floor and rolled away. Even though her head was spinning, she managed to stay on her feet and for a few seconds she focused only on Greitz. She was surprised at how calm the woman looked.

“Go ahead and kill me. I’ll die with pride,” Greitz said.

“With pride, did you say?”

“Absolutely.”

“Not going to happen.”

Salander looked sick and spoke in a flat, exhausted voice, but still, Greitz knew that this was the end of the road. She looked towards the window on her left, out towards Karlbergsvägen, and hesitated for a second or two. Then it became clear that she had no alternative. Anything would be better than ending up in Salander’s clutches. So she made a dash for the balcony door and felt the terrifying pull of the urge to jump – but Salander caught her before she could climb over the railing. It wasn’t exactly what either of them had expected. Rakel Greitz was being saved by the person she had dreaded more than anyone else. Salander held her firmly and led her back into her clinically clean apartment.

“You
will
die, Rakel. Don’t you worry about that,” she whispered in her ear.

“I know,” she said. “I’ve got cancer.”

“The cancer’s nothing.” Salander’s tone was chilling.

“What do you mean?”

Salander stared at the ground.

“Holger meant a lot to me,” she said, and she gripped Greitz’s hand so hard it felt as if her blood had frozen. “What I’m saying is that the cancer will seem like nothing, Rakel. You’re going to die of shame too, and believe me, that’ll be the worst part. I’ll make sure so much dirt is unearthed about you that no-one will remember you for anything other than all the evil you have unleashed. You’ll be buried in your own excrement.”

She said this with such conviction that Greitz believed it. Then Salander calmly opened the door to let in a group of policemen, who had handcuffed Benjamin to a banister.

“Good afternoon, Fru Greitz. You and I have a lot to talk about. We’ve just arrested your colleague, Professor Steinberg,” said a dark-haired man with a half-smile, who introduced himself as Chief Inspector Bublanski.

It did not take his men long to find the safe behind her wardrobe. The last she saw of Salander was her back as paramedics led her away. Salander didn’t turn around once. It was as if Greitz no longer existed for her.

It was another hot summer’s day. There had not been a drop of rain for two weeks. Blomkvist was in the kitchen area at
Millennium
’s editorial offices on Götgatan. He had just finished writing his long piece on the Registry and Project 9. He stretched his back and drank some water and looked over towards the bright-blue sofa on the other side of the room.

Erika Berger lay stretched out in her high-heeled shoes, reading his article. He was not exactly nervous. He knew for sure it made for harrowing reading. They had a scoop which would be tremendous for the magazine. Yet he still did not know how Berger would react – not because of the one or two sections which gave rise to ethical questions, but because of their argument.

He had told her that he would not be spending the Midsummer weekend out in the archipelago or celebrating in any way but instead would concentrate on his story. He needed to go through the documents he had received from Bublanski, and he needed to interview Hilda von Kanterborg again, as well as Dan Brody and Leo Mannheimer, who had come to Stockholm from Toronto in secret with his fiancée.

He had been working pretty much around the clock, not just on the report about the Registry but also on the Faria Kazi story. It was not he who had actually written it, Sofie Melker had. But he was involved from start to finish and had discussed the legal process with his sister while she worked to get Faria released and protected with a new identity.

He was regularly in touch with Inspector Modig, who was leading the newly reopened inquiry into what was now accepted as the murder of Jamal Chowdhury, for which Bashir, Razan and Khalil Kazi and two others were in custody and awaiting trial. Benito Andersson had been taken to Hammerfors Prison in Härnösand, and she too was awaiting fresh charges. Plus Blomkvist often got caught up in long conversations with Bublanski, and he was spending more time on the purely stylistic side of the story, too.

But even he got to the point where he could do no more. He needed a break. He was almost seeing double, and it was unbearably hot at his desk on Bellmansgatan. One afternoon he felt a pang of longing and called Malin Frode.

“Would you come over?” he said. “Pretty please.”

Malin agreed to get a babysitter if Blomkvist promised to buy strawberries and champagne and turn back his sheets, and not have his mind on other things like Kalle Bloody Blomkvist usually did. He told her the conditions sounded reasonable enough. And so they were tumbling about in bed, happy and drunk and oblivious to the rest of the world, when Berger dropped by unannounced with an expensive bottle of red wine.

Berger had never considered Blomkvist a model of good behaviour, and she herself was married and not overly scrupulous about dalliances. Yet it had all got out of hand. If he had had the time and inclination he could have worked out why. One reason was Malin’s fiery temperament, and another was the fact that Berger was upset and embarrassed. They had
all
been embarrassed. The women began to argue with each other, and then they argued with him too, until Berger marched off in fury, slamming the door behind her. Since then, conversations at the magazine between her and Blomkvist had been strained and confined to work issues.

But now Berger was lying there reading, and Blomkvist was thinking about Salander. She had been discharged from hospital and had flown in haste to Gibraltar – she said she had business to attend to there. But they had kept in touch every day about Faria Kazi, and about the investigation into the Registry.

So far, the public knew nothing about the background to the story, and the names of the presumed suspects had not yet been published in any major media. Berger had therefore been insistent that they swiftly put out a special issue of the magazine, so that no-one could scoop them. Perhaps that was why she was so upset when she found Blomkvist lying in bed drinking champagne. Though he could not have been more serious about getting the report ready.

Now he kept sneaking looks at Berger, who eventually took off her reading glasses and got up and joined him in the kitchen. She was wearing jeans and a blue blouse, open at the neck. She sat next to him at the table. He couldn’t guess whether she would begin with praise or with criticism.

“I don’t understand it.”

“That’s unfortunate,” he said. “I was hoping I had shed at least some light on the story.”

“Why on earth did they keep it a secret for so long?”

“Leo and Dan? As I say in the article, there was evidence that Leo had been involved in illegal transactions through various dummy companies. Although it’s clear now that Ivar Ögren and Rakel Greitz had set him up, Leo and Dan couldn’t find any way of getting at them. Besides, and I hope this is clear from what I’ve written, they were beginning to enjoy their new roles. Neither of them was short of money – large sums were being transferred all the time – and I think both of them were experiencing a new kind of freedom, a bit like the freedom that any actor enjoys. They could start afresh and do something different. I can understand the appeal.”

“And then they fell in love.”

“With Julia and Marie.”

“The pictures are wonderful.”

“That’s something at least.”

“It’s good that we’ve got decent photographers,” she said. “But you do realize that Ivar Ögren’s going to sue the crap out of us?”

“I think we’re well armed for that, Erika.”

“Plus I’m worried about defaming the dead – because of that fatal incident at the elk hunt.”

“I’m pretty sure I’m on firm ground there too. All I’m actually saying is that the circumstances surrounding the shooting are unclear.”

“I’m not sure it’s good enough. Just
that
is already pretty damaging.”

“O.K., I’ll take another look. Is there anything that
doesn’t
worry you, or that you even … dare I say it,
do
understand.

“You’re a bastard.”

“Maybe a bit. Especially after dark.”

“Are you planning to devote yourself to one woman only from now on, or are you considering spending time with others too?”

“At a pinch I could imagine drinking champagne with you, if the worst came to the worst.”

“You won’t have any choice.”

“Will you force me?”

“If I have to, yes, because this article – the part we’re not going to be sued for, that is – it’s …”

She held back.

“Broadly acceptable?” he said.

“You could say that,” she replied, and smiled. “Congratulations.” She opened her arms to embrace him.

But then something else grabbed their attention, and later it would prove difficult to recall the exact sequence of events. Sofie Melker was probably the first to react. She was at her computer in the editorial offices and yelled out something incomprehensible, but it was clear that she was either shocked or surprised. Soon afterwards – or at the same time – Berger and Blomkvist received news flashes on their mobiles. Neither of them was especially worried. It was not a terrorist attack, or a threat of war. It was only a stock market crash. But gradually they were consumed by the events as they unfolded. Step by step they entered into the state of heightened awareness which one finds in every press room when major, world-shattering news events occur. They became wholly concentrated and shouted out what they saw on their computers. There were new developments every minute.

The crash accelerated. The floor was pulled out from under the market. The Stockholm index was down by 6 per cent, then 8, and fell further to minus 9 and 14 per cent. At that stage it showed signs of a small recovery, then continued to fall again, as if plummeting into a black hole. It was a full-blown crash, a galloping panic, and so far nobody seemed to understand what was happening.

There was nothing specific, no apparent trigger. People muttered:

“Incomprehensible, it’s madness! What’s going on?” Soon after, when the experts were called in, all the usual explanations were trotted out: an overheated economy, low interest rates, the over-valued market, political threats from both the West and the East, instability in the Middle East and fascist and anti-democratic movements in Europe and the U.S.A. – a political witches’ cauldron reminiscent of the 1930s. But nothing new had happened that day, no development significant enough to have precipitated a disaster on this scale. The panic appeared out of nowhere and was self-sustaining.

Blomkvist was not the only one reminded of the hacker attack on Finance Security in April. He went onto social media and was not surprised to find rumours and allegations raging, all too often gaining a foothold in the mainstream media. Blomkvist said aloud, though it sounded more as if he were talking to himself:

“It’s not just the stock exchange that’s crashing.”

“What do you mean?” Berger said.

“Truth is going the same way.”

It was as if the internet trolls had taken over to create a fake dynamic in which lies and truth were set against each other as if they were equivalent notions. An impenetrable fog of fabrications and conspiracy theories settled over the world. Sometimes the trolls did a good job, sometimes not. For example, it was reported that financier Christer Tallgren had shot himself in his apartment in Paris, devastated by the fact that his millions – or was it billions? – had gone up in smoke. Tallgren’s own denial of the story on Twitter was not the only noteworthy thing about it; there was also the fact that it echoed Ivar Kreuger’s death by his own hand in 1932.

A mixture of urban myths and apocryphal stories, both new and old, swirled in the air. There was talk of automated trading having run amok, about financial centres and media houses and websites having been hacked. But there were also reports that people were about to jump to their deaths from balconies and roofs in Östermalm, which not only sounded wildly melodramatic but also harked back to the 1929 stock exchange crash, when roofers working on Wall Street were said to have been mistaken for ill-fated investors, and had contributed to the tumbling market merely by being up there.

It was claimed that Handelsbanken had stopped its payments and that Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs were on the verge of bankruptcy. News came pouring in from every direction, and not even a well-trained eye like Blomkvist’s could tell the difference between what was true and what was fabricated by the organized groups of trolls in the East.