"Could we talk to the prosecutor?"
"No," Edklinth said. "As prime minister, you may not influence the judicial process in any way."
"In other words, Salander will have to take her chances in court," the minister of justice said. "Only if she loses the trial and appeals to the government can the government step in and pardon her or require the PG to investigate whether there are grounds for a new trial. But this applies only if she's sentenced to prison. If she's sentenced to a secure psychiatric facility, the government cannot do a thing. Then it's a medical matter, and the prime minister has no jurisdiction to determine whether or not she is sane."
At 10:00 on Friday night, Salander heard the key turn in the door. She instantly switched off her Palm and slipped it under the mattress. When she looked up she saw Jonasson closing the door.
"Good evening, Froken Salander," he said. "And how are you doing this evening?"
"I have a splitting headache and I feel feverish."
"That doesn't sound so good."
Salander looked to be not particularly bothered by either the fever or the headache. Jonasson spent ten minutes examining her. He noticed that over the course of the evening her fever had again risen dramatically.
"It's a shame that you should be having this setback when you've been recovering so well over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, I now won't be able to discharge you for at least two more weeks."
"Two weeks should be sufficient."
The distance by land from London to Stockholm is roughly 1,180 miles. In theory that would be about twenty hours' driving. In fact it had taken almost twenty hours to reach the northern border of Germany with Denmark. The sky was filled with leaden thunderclouds, and when the man known as Trinity found himself on Sunday in the middle of the Oresundsbron, there was a downpour. He slowed and turned on his windshield wipers.
Trinity thought it was sheer hell driving in Europe, since everyone on the Continent insisted on driving on the wrong side of the road. He had packed his van on Friday morning and taken the ferry from Dover to Calais, then crossed Belgium by way of Liege. He crossed the German border at Aachen and then took the Autobahn north towards Hamburg and on to Denmark.
His companion, Bob the Dog, was asleep in the back. They had taken turns driving, and apart from a couple of hour-long stops along the way, they had maintained a steady fifty-five miles an hour. The van was eighteen years old and wasn't able to go much faster anyway.
There were easier ways of getting from London to Stockholm, but it wasn't likely that he would be able to take more than sixty pounds of electronic gear on a normal flight. They had crossed six national borders, but they had not been stopped once, either by customs or by passport control. Trinity was an ardent fan of the EU, whose regulations simplified his visits to the Continent.
Trinity had been born in Bradford, but he had lived in north London since childhood. He had had a miserable formal education, and then attended a vocational school and earned a certificate as a trained telecommunications technician. For three years after his nineteenth birthday he had worked as an engineer for British Telecom. Once he understood how the telephone network functioned and realized how hopelessly antiquated it was, he switched to being a private security consultant, installing alarm systems and managing burglary protection. For special clients he would also offer his video surveillance and telephone-tapping services.
Now thirty-two years old, he had a theoretical knowledge of electronics and computer science that allowed him to challenge any professor in the field. He had lived with computers since he was ten, and he hacked his first computer when he was thirteen.
It had whetted his appetite, and when he was sixteen he had advanced to the extent that he could compete with the best in the world. There was a period in which he spent every waking minute in front of his computer screen, writing his own programmes and planting insidious tendrils on the Internet. He infiltrated the BBC, the Ministry of Defence, and Scotland Yard. He even managed--for a short time--to take command of a nuclear submarine on patrol in the North Sea. It was for the best that Trinity belonged to the inquisitive rather than the malicious type of computer marauder. His fascination was extinguished the moment he had cracked a computer, gained access, and appropriated its secrets.
He was one of the founders of Hacker Republic. And Wasp was one of its citizens.
It was 7:30 on Sunday evening as he and Bob the Dog approached Stockholm. When they passed IKEA at Kungens Kurva in Skarholmen, Trinity flipped open his mobile and dialled a number he had memorized.
"Plague," Trinity said.
"Where are you guys?"
"You said to call when we passed IKEA."
Plague gave him directions to the youth hostel on Langholmen where he had booked a room for his colleagues from England. Since Plague hardly ever left his apartment, they agreed to meet at his place at 10:00 the next morning.
Plague decided to make an exceptional effort and washed the dishes, generally cleaned up, and opened the windows in anticipation of his guests' arrival.
PART 3
Disk Crash
MAY 27-JUNE 6
The historian Diodorus from Sicily, second century BC (who is regarded as an unreliable source by other historians), describes the Amazons of Libya, which at that time was a name used for all of north Africa west of Egypt. This Amazon reign was a gynaecocracy; that is, only women were allowed to hold high office, including in the military. According to legend, the realm was ruled by a Queen Myrina, who with 30,000 female soldiers and 3,000 female cavalry swept through Egypt and Syria and all the way to the Aegean, defeating a number of male armies along the way. After Queen Myrina finally fell in battle, her army scattered.
But the army did leave its imprint on the region. The women of Anatolia took to the sword to crush an invasion from the Caucasus, after the male soldiers were all slaughtered in a far-reaching genocide. These women trained in the use of all types of weapons, including bow and arrow, spear, battleaxe, and lance. They copied their bronze breastplates and armour from the Greeks.
They rejected marriage as subjugation. So that they might have children they were granted a leave of absence, during which they copulated with randomly selected males from nearby towns.
Only a woman who had killed a man in battle was allowed to give up her virginity.
CHAPTER 16
Friday, May 27-Tuesday, May 31
Blomkvist left the Millennium offices at 10:30 on Friday night. He took the stairs down to the ground floor, but instead of going out onto the street he turned left and went through the basement, across the inner courtyard, and through the building behind theirs onto Hokens Gata. He ran into a group of youths on their way from Mosebacke, but no-one seemed to be paying him any attention. Anyone watching the building would think that he was spending the night at Millennium, as he often did. He had established that pattern as early as April. Actually it was Malm who had the night shift.
He spent fifteen minutes walking down the alleys and boulevards around Mosebacke before he headed for Fiskargatan 9. He opened the door using the code and took the stairs to the top-floor apartment, where he used Salander's keys to get in. He turned off the alarm. He always felt a bit bemused when he went into the apartment: twenty-one rooms, of which only three were furnished.
He made coffee and sandwiches before he went into Salander's office and booted up her PowerBook.
From the moment in mid-April when Bjorck's report was stolen and Blomkvist realized he was under surveillance, he had established his own headquarters at Salander's apartment. He had transferred the most crucial documentation to her desk. He spent several nights a week at the apartment, slept in her bed, and worked on her computer. She had wiped her hard drive clean before she left for Gosseberga and the confrontation with Zalachenko. Blomkvist supposed that she had not planned to come back. He had used her system disks to restore her computer to a functioning state.
Since April he had not even plugged in the broadba
nd cable to his own machine. He logged on to her broadband connection, started up the ICQ chat programme, and pinged up the address she had created for him through the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table].
Ping.
Blomkvist smiled.
Blomkvist logged in to ICQ and went into the newly created Yahoo group [The_Knights]. All he found was a link from Plague to an anonymous URL which consisted solely of numbers. He copied the address into Explorer, hit the Return key, and came to a website somewhere on the Internet that contained the sixteen gigabytes of Ekstrom's hard drive.
Plague had obviously made it simple for himself by copying over Ekstrom's entire hard drive, and Blomkvist spent more than an hour sorting through its contents. He ignored the system files, software, and endless files containing preliminary investigations that seemed to stretch back several years. He downloaded four folders. Three of them were called [PrelimInv/Salander], [Slush/Salander], and [PrelimInv/Niedermann]. The fourth was a copy of Ekstrom's email folder made at 2:00 p.m. the previous day.
"Thanks, Plague," Blomkvist said to himself.
He spent three hours reading through Ekstrom's preliminary investigation and strategy for the trial. Not surprisingly, much of it dealt with Salander's mental state. Ekstrom wanted an extensive psychiatric examination and had sent a lot of messages with the object of getting her transferred to Kronoberg prison as a matter of urgency.
Blomkvist could tell that Ekstrom was making no headway in his search for Niedermann. Bublanski was the leader of that investigation. He had succeeded in gathering some forensic evidence linking Niedermann to the murders of Svensson and Johansson, as well as to the murder of Bjurman. Blomkvist's own three long interviews in April had set them on the trail of this evidence. If Niedermann were ever apprehended, Blomkvist would have to be a witness for the prosecution. At long last DNA from sweat droplets and two hairs from Bjurman's apartment were matched to items from Niedermann's room in Gosseberga. The same DNA was found in abundant quantities on the remains of Svavelsjo MC's Goransson.
On the other hand, Ekstrom had remarkably little on the record about Zalachenko.
Blomkvist lit a cigarette and stood by the window looking out towards Djurgarden.
Ekstrom was leading two separate preliminary investigations. Criminal Inspector Faste was the investigative leader in all matters dealing with Salander. Bublanski was working only on Niedermann.
When the name Zalachenko turned up in the preliminary investigation, the logical thing for Ekstrom to do would have been to contact the general director of the Security Police to determine who Zalachenko actually was. Blomkvist could find no such enquiry in Ekstrom's email, journal, or notes. But among the notes Blomkvist found several cryptic sentences.
The Salander investigation is fake. Bjorck's original doesn't match Blomkvist's version. Classify Top Secret.
Then a series of notes claiming that Salander was paranoid and a schizophrenic.
Correct to lock up Salander 1991.
He found what linked the investigations in the Salander slush, that is, the supplementary information that the prosecutor considered irrelevant to the preliminary investigation, and which would therefore not be presented at the trial or make up part of the chain of evidence against her. This included almost everything that had to do with Zalachenko's background.
The investigation was totally inadequate.
Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence and to what extent it was contrived. Where was the boundary? And was Ekstrom aware that there was a boundary?
Could it be that someone was deliberately supplying Ekstrom with believable but misleading information?
Finally Blomkvist logged into Hotmail and spent ten minutes checking the half-dozen anonymous email accounts he had created. Each day he had checked the address he had given to Criminal Inspector Modig. He had no great hope that she would contact him, so he was mildly surprised when he opened the in-box and found an email from . The message consisted of a single line:
Cafe Madeleine, upper level, 11:00 a.m. Saturday.
Plague pinged Salander at midnight and interrupted her in the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time with Holger Palmgren as her guardian. She cast an irritated glance at the display.
She sat up in bed and looked eagerly at the screen of her Palm.
Plague gave her the URL of the server where he kept Teleborian's hard drive.
Salander disconnected from Plague and accessed the server he had directed her to. She spent nearly three hours scrutinizing folder after folder on Teleborian's computer.
She found correspondence between Teleborian and a person with a Hotmail address who sent encrypted email. Since she had access to Teleborian's PGP key, she easily decoded the correspondence. His name was Jonas, no last name. Jonas and Teleborian had an unhealthy interest in seeing that Salander did not thrive.
Yes, we can prove that there is a conspiracy.
But what really interested Salander were the forty-seven folders containing close to 9,000 photographs of explicit child pornography. She clicked on image after image of children aged about fifteen or younger. A number of pictures were of infants. The majority were of girls. Many of them were sadistic.
She found links to at least a dozen people abroad who traded child porn with one another.
Salander bit her lip, but her face was otherwise expressionless.
She remembered the nights when, as a twelve-year-old, she had been strapped down in a stimulus-free room at St. Stefan's. Teleborian had come into the room again and again to look at her in the glow of the night light.
She knew. He had never touched her, but she had always known.
She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.
After a while she pinged Blomkvist on ICQ.
Blomkvist spent the night at Salander's apartment on Fiskargatan. He did not shut down the computer until 6:30 a.m. and fell asleep with photographs of gross child pornography whirling through his mind. He woke at 10:15 and rolled out of Salander's bed, showered, and called a taxi to pick him up outside Sodra theatre. He got out at Birger Jarlsgatan at 10:55 and walked to Cafe Madeleine.
Modig was waiting for him with a cup of black coffee in front of her.
"Hi," Blomkvist said.
"I'm taking a big risk here," she said without greeting.
"Nobody will hear of ou
r meeting from me."
She seemed stressed.
"One of my colleagues recently went to see former prime minister Falldin. He went there on his own initiative, and his job is on the line now too."
"I understand."
"I need a guarantee of anonymity for both of us."
"I don't even know which colleague you're talking about."
"I'll tell you later. I want you to promise to give him protection as a source."
"You have my word."
She looked at her watch.
"Are you in a hurry?"
"Yes. I have to meet my husband and kids at the Sturegallerian in ten minutes. He thinks I'm still at work."
"And Bublanski knows nothing about this?"
"No."
"Right. You and your colleague are sources and you have complete source protection. Both of you. As long as you live."
"My colleague is Jerker Holmberg. You met him down in Goteborg. His father is a Centre Party member, and Jerker has known Prime Minister Falldin since he was a child. He seems to be pleasant enough. So Jerker went to see him and asked about Zalachenko."
Blomkvist's heart began to pound.
"Jerker asked Falldin what he knew about the defection, but Falldin didn't reply. When Holmberg told him that we suspect Salander was locked up by the people who were protecting Zalachenko, well, that really upset him."
"Did he say how much he knew?"
"Falldin told him that the chief of Sapo at the time and a colleague came to visit him very soon after he became prime minister. They told a fantastic story about a Russian defector who had come to Sweden, told him that it was the most sensitive military secret Sweden possessed, that there was nothing in Swedish military intelligence that was anywhere near as important. Falldin said he didn't know how to handle it, that there was no-one with much experience in government, the Social Democrats having been in power for more than forty years. He was advised that he alone had to make the decisions, and that if he discussed it with his government colleagues then Sapo would wash their hands of it. He remembered the whole thing as being very unpleasant."
"What did he do?"
"He realized he had no choice but to do what the gentlemen from Sapo proposed. He issued a directive putting Sapo in sole charge of the defector. He pledged never to discuss the matter with anyone. Falldin was never ever told Zalachenko's name."