PART 1
Irregular Equations
DECEMBER 16–20
Equations are classified by the highest power (value of the exponent) of their
unknowns. If this is one, the equation is of first degree. If this is two, the equation
is of second degree, and so on. Equations of higher degree than one yield multiple
possible values for their unknown quantities. These values are known as roots.
The first-degree equation (the linear equation):3x - 9 = 0 (root: x = 3)
CHAPTER 1
Thursday, December 16–Friday, December 17
Lisbeth Salander pulled her sunglasses down to the tip of her nose and squinted
from beneath the brim of her sun hat. She saw the woman from room 32 come out
of the hotel side entrance and walk to one of the green-and-white-striped chaises
longues beside the pool. Her gaze was fixed on the ground and her progress seemed
unsteady.
Salander had seen her only at a distance. She reckoned the woman was around
thirty-five, but she looked as though she could be anything from twenty-five to
fifty. She had shoulder-length brown hair, an oval face, and a body that was straight
out of a mail-order catalogue for lingerie. She had a black bikini, sandals, and
purple-tinted sunglasses. She was American and spoke with a southern accent. She
dropped a yellow sun hat next to the chaise longue and signalled to the bartender
at Ella Carmichael’s bar.
Salander put her book down on her lap and sipped her iced coffee before reaching
for a pack of cigarettes. Without turning her head she shifted her gaze to the
horizon. She could just see the Caribbean through a group of palm trees and the
rhododendrons in front of the hotel. A yacht was on its way north towards St. Lucia
or Dominica. Further out, she could see the outline of a grey freighter heading
south in the direction of Guyana. A breeze made the morning heat bearable, but she
felt a drop of sweat trickling into her eyebrow. Salander did not care for
sunbathing. She had spent her days as far as possible in shade, and even now was
under the awning on the terrace. And yet she was as brown as a nut. She had on
khaki shorts and a black top.
She listened to the strange music from steel drums flowing out of the speakers at
the bar. She could not tell the difference between Sven-Ingvars and Nick Cave, but
steel drums fascinated her. It seemed hardly feasible that anyone could tune an oil
barrel, and even less credible that the barrel could make music like nothing else in
the world. She thought those sounds were like magic.
She suddenly felt irritated and looked again at the woman, who had just been
handed a glass of some orange-coloured drink.
It was not Lisbeth Salander’s problem, but she could not comprehend why the
woman stayed. For four nights, ever since the couple had arrived, Salander had
listened to the muted terror being played out in the room next door to hers. She
had heard crying and low, excitable voices, and sometimes the unmistakable sound
of slaps. The man responsible for the blows—Salander assumed he was the woman’s
husband—had straight dark hair parted down the middle in an old-fashioned style,
and he seemed to be in Grenada on business. What kind of business, Salander had
no idea, but every morning the man appeared with his briefcase, in a jacket and tie,
and had coffee in the hotel bar before he went outside to look for a taxi.
He would come back to the hotel in the late afternoon, when he took a swim and
sat with his wife by the pool. They had dinner together in what on the surface
seemed to be a quiet and loving way. The woman may have had a few too many
drinks, but her intoxication was not obnoxious.
Each night the commotion in the next-door room had started just as Salander was
going to bed with a book about the mysteries of mathematics. It did not sound like
a full-on assault. As far as Salander could tell through the wall, it was one
repetitive, tedious argument. The night before, Salander had not been able to
contain her curiosity. She had gone out to the balcony to listen through the
couple’s open balcony door. For more than an hour the man had paced back and
forth in the room, declaring that he was a jerk who didn’t deserve her. Again and
again he said that she must think he was a fraud. No, she would answer, she didn’t,
and she tried to calm him. He became more intense, and seemed to give her a
shake. So at last she gave him the answer he wanted … Yes, you are a fraud. And he
immediately took this as a pretext to berate her. He called her a whore, which was
an accusation that Salander would have taken measures to combat if it had been
directed at her. It had not been, but nevertheless she thought for a long time about
whether she ought to take some sort of action.
Salander had listened in astonishment to this rancorous bickering, which all of a
sudden ended with something that sounded like a slap in the face. She had been on
the point of going into the hotel corridor to kick in her neighbours’ door when
silence descended over the room.
Now, as she scrutinized the woman by the pool, she could see a faint bruise on her
shoulder and a scrape on her hip, but no other injury.
Some months earlier Salander had read an article in a Popular Science that
someone had left behind at Leonardo da Vinci Airport in Rome, and she developed a
vague fascination with the obscure topic of spherical astronomy. On impulse she
had made her way to the university bookshop in Rome to buy some of the key
works on the subject. To be able to get a grasp of spherical astronomy, however,
she had had to immerse herself in the deeper mysteries of mathematics. In the
course of her travels in recent months she had been to other university bookshops
to seek out more books.
Her studies had been unsystematic and without any real objective, at least until she
wandered into the university bookshop in Miami and came out with Dimensions in
Mathematics, by Dr. L. C. Parnault (Harvard University Press, 1999). That was just
before she went down to the Florida Keys and began island-hopping through the
Caribbean.
She had been to Guadeloupe (two nights in a hideous dump), Dominica (fun and
relaxed, five nights), Barbados (one night at an American hotel where she felt
terribly unwelcome), and St. Lucia (nine nights). She would have considered staying
longer had she not made an enemy of a slow-witted young hoodlum who haunted
the bar of her backstreet hotel. Finally she lost patience and whacked him on the
head with a brick, checked out of the hotel, and took a ferry to St. George’s, the
capital of Grenada. This was a country she had never heard of before she bought
her ticket for the boat.
She had come ashore on Grenada in a tropical rainstorm at 10:00 one November
morning. From the Caribbean Traveller she learned that Grenada was known as
Spice Island and was one of the world’s leading producers of nutmeg. The island
had a population of 120,000, but another 200,000 Grenadians lived in the United
States, Canada, or Britain, which gave some indication of the employment market
in their homeland. The terrain was mountainous around a dormant volcano, Grand
Etang.
Grenada was one of many small, former-British colonies. In 1795, Julian Fedon, a
black planter of mixed French ancestry, led an uprising inspired by the French
Revolution. Troops were sent to shoot, hang, or maim the rebels. What had shaken
the colonial regime was that even poor whites, so-called petits blancs, had joined
Fedon’s rebellion without the least regard for racial boundaries. The uprising was
crushed, but Fedon was never captured; he vanished into the mountainous Grand
Etang and became a Robin Hood–like legend.
Some two hundred years later, in 1979, a lawyer called Maurice Bishop started a
new revolution, which the guidebook said was inspired by the Communist
dictatorships in Cuba and Nicaragua. But Salander was given a different picture of
things when she met Philip Campbell—teacher, librarian, and Baptist preacher. She
had taken a room in his guesthouse for the first few days. The gist of the story was
that Bishop was a popular folk leader who had deposed an insane dictator, a UFO
nutcase who had devoted part of the meagre national budget to chasing flying
saucers. Bishop had lobbied for economic democracy and introduced the country’s
first legislation for sexual equality. And then in 1983 he was assassinated.
There followed a massacre of more than a hundred people, including the foreign
minister, the minister for women’s affairs, and some senior trade union leaders.
Then the United States invaded the country and set up a democracy. As far as
Grenada was concerned, this meant that unemployment rose from around 6
percent to almost 50 percent and the cocaine trade once more became the largest
single source of income. Campbell shook his head in dismay at the description in
Salander’s guidebook and gave her some tips on the kinds of people and
neighbourhoods she should avoid after dark.
In Salander’s case, such advice normally fell on deaf ears. However, she had avoided
making the acquaintance of the criminal element on Grenada by falling in love with
Grand Anse Beach, just south of St. George’s, a sparsely populated beach that went
on for miles. There she could walk for hours without having to talk to or even
encounter another living soul. She moved to the Keys, one of the few American
hotels on Grand Anse, and stayed for seven weeks, doing little more than walking
on the beach and eating the local fruit, called chin-ups, which reminded her of sour
Swedish gooseberries—she found them delightful.
It was the off season, and barely a third of the rooms at the Keys Hotel were
occupied. The only problem was that both her peace and quiet and her
preoccupation with mathematical studies had been disturbed by the subdued terror
in the room next door.
• • •
Mikael Blomkvist rang the doorbell of Salander’s apartment on Lundagatan. He did
not expect her to open the door, but he had fallen into the habit of calling at her
apartment every week or so to see whether anything had changed. He lifted the
flap on the mailbox and could see the same heap of junk mail. It was late, and too
dark to make out how much the pile might have grown since his last visit.
He stood on the landing for a moment before turning on his heel in frustration. He
strolled leisurely to his own apartment on Bellmansgatan, put on some coffee, and
looked through the evening papers before the late TV news Rapport came on. He
was irritated and depressed not to know where Salander was. He felt stirrings of
unease and wondered for the thousandth time what had happened.
He had invited Salander to his cabin in Sandhamn for the Christmas holidays. They
had gone for long walks and calmly discussed the repercussions of the dramatic
events in which they had both been involved over the past year, when Blomkvist
went through what he came to think of as an early midlife crisis. He had been
convicted of libel and spent two months in prison, his professional career as a
journalist had been in the gutter, and he had resigned from his position as
publisher of the magazine Millennium more or less in disgrace. But at that point
everything had turned around. A commission to write a biography of the
industrialist Henrik Vanger—which he had regarded as an absurdly well-paid form
of therapy—had turned into a terrifying hunt for a serial killer.
During this manhunt he had met Salander. Blomkvist unconsciously stroked the
faint scar that the noose had left beneath his left ear. Salander had not only helped
him to track down the killer—she had saved his life.
Time and again she had amazed him with her odd talents—she had a photographic
memory and phenomenal computer skills. Blomkvist considered himself virtually
computer illiterate, but Salander handled computers as if she had made a pact with
the Devil. He had come to realize that she was a world-class hacker, and within an
exclusive international community devoted to computer crime at the highest level—
and not only to combatting it—she was a legend. She was known online only as
Wasp.
It was her ability to pass freely into other people’s computers that had given him
the material which transformed his professional humiliation into what was to be
“the Wennerström affair”—a scoop that a year later was still the subject of
international police investigations into unsolved financial crimes. And Blomkvist
was still being invited to appear on TV talk shows.
At the time, a year ago, he had thought of the scoop with colossal satisfaction—as
vengeance and as rehabilitation. But the satisfaction had soon ebbed. Within a few
weeks he was sick and tired of answering the same questions from journalists and
the financial police. I’m sorry, but I can’t reveal my sources. When a reporter from
the English-language Azerbaijan Times had come all the way to Stockholm to ask
him the same questions, it was the last straw. Blomkvist cut the interviews to a
minimum, and in recent months he had relented only when the woman from She
on TV4 talked him into it, and that had happened only because the investigation
had apparently moved into a new phase.
Blomkvist’s cooperation with the woman from TV4 had another dimension. She had
been the first journalist to pounce on the story, and without her programme on the
evening that Millennium released the scoop, it might not have made the impact it
did. Only later did Blomkvist find out that she had had to fight tooth and nail to
convince her editor to run it. There had been massive resistance to giving any
prominence to “that clown” at Millennium, and right up to the moment she went
on air, it was far from certain that the battery of company lawyers would give the
story the all clear. Several of her more senior colleagues had given it a
thumbs-down and told her that if she was wrong, her career was over. She stood her
ground, and it became the story of the year.
She had covered the story herself that first week—after all, she was the only
reporter who had thoroughly researched the subject—but some time before
Christmas Blomkvist noticed that all the new angles in the story had been handed
over to male colleagues. Around New Year’s Blomkvist heard through the grapevine
that she had been elbowed out, with the excuse that such an important story
should be handled by experienced financial reporters, and not some little girl from
Gotland or Bergslagen or wherever the hell she was from. The next time TV4 called,
Blomkvist explained frankly that he would talk to them only if “she” asked the
questions. Days of sullen silence went by before the boys at TV4 capitulated.
Blomkvist’s waning interest in the Wennerström affair coincided with Salander’s
disappearance from his life. He still could not understand what had happened.
They had parted two days after Christmas, and he had not seen her for the rest of
the week. On the day before New Year’s Eve he telephoned her, but there was no
answer.
On New Year’s Eve he went to her apartment twice and rang the bell. The first time
there had been lights on, but she had not answered the door. The second time
there were no lights. On New Year’s Day he called her again, and still there was no
answer, but he did get a message from the telephone company saying that the
subscriber could not be reached.
He had seen her twice in the next few days. When he could not get hold of her on
the phone, he went to her apartment and sat down to wait on the steps beside her
front door. He had brought a book with him, and he waited stubbornly for four
hours before she appeared through the main entrance, just before 11:00 at night.
She was carrying a brown box and stopped short when she saw him.
“Hello, Lisbeth,” he said, closing his book.
She looked at him without expression, no sign of warmth or even friendship in her
gaze. Then she walked past him and stuck her key in the door.
“Aren’t you going to offer me a cup of coffee?” he said.
She turned and said in a low voice: “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you ever
again.”
Then she shut the door in his face, and he heard her lock it from the inside. He was
bewildered.
Three days later, he had taken the tunnelbana from Slussen to T-Centralen, and
when the train stopped in Gamla Stan he looked out the window and she was
standing on the platform less than two yards away. He caught sight of her at the
exact moment the doors closed. For five seconds she stared right through him, as
though he were nothing but air, before she turned and walked out of his field of
vision as the train began to move.
The implication was unmistakable. She wanted nothing to do with him. She had cut
him out of her life as surgically and decisively as she deleted files from her
computer, and without explanation. She had changed her mobile phone number
and did not answer her email.
Blomkvist sighed, switched off the TV, and went to the window to gaze out at City
Hall.
Perhaps he was making a mistake in going to her apartment from time to time. His
attitude had always been that if a woman clearly indicated that she did not want
anything more to do with him, he would go on his way. Not respecting such a
message would, in his eyes, show a lack of respect for her.
Blomkvist and Salander had slept together. It had been at her initiative, and the
relationship had lasted for half a year. If it was her decision to end the affair—as
surprisingly as she had started it—then that was OK with Blomkvist. He had no
difficulty with the role of ex-boyfriend—if that was what he was—but Salander’s
total repudiation of him was astonishing.
He was not in love with her—they were about as unlike as two people could
possibly be—but he was very fond of her and really missed her, as exasperating as
she sometimes was. He had thought their liking was mutual. In short, he felt like
an idiot.
He stood at the window a long time.
Finally he made a decision. If Salander thought so little of him that she could not
even bring herself to greet him when they saw each other in the tunnelbana, then
their friendship was apparently over and the damage irreparable. He would make
no attempt to contact her again.
Salander looked at her watch and realized that although she was sitting, perfectly
still, in the shade, she was drenched with sweat. It was 10:30. She memorized a
mathematical formula three lines long and closed her book, Dimensions in
Mathematics. Then she picked up her key and the pack of cigarettes on the table.
Her room was on the third floor, which was also the top floor of the hotel. She
stripped off her clothes and got into the shower.
A green lizard eight inches long was staring at her from the wall just below the
ceiling. Salander stared back but made no move to shoo it away. There were lizards
everywhere on the island. They came through the blinds at the open window,
under the door, or through the vent in the bathroom. She liked having company
that left her alone. The water was almost ice cold, and she stayed under the shower
for five minutes to cool off.
When she came back into the room she stood naked in front of the mirror on the
wardrobe door and examined her body with amazement. She still weighed less than
ninety pounds and stood four foot eleven. Well, there was not much she could do
about that. She had doll-like, almost delicate limbs, small hands, and hardly any
hips.
But now she had breasts
.
All her life she had been flat-chested, as if she had never reached puberty. She
thought it had looked ridiculous, and she was always uncomfortable showing
herself naked.
Now, all of a sudden, she had breasts. They were by no means gigantic—that was
not what she had wanted, and they would have looked ridiculous on her otherwise
skinny body—but they were two solid, round breasts of medium size. The
enlargement had been well done, and the proportions were reasonable. But the
difference was dramatic, both for her looks and for her self-confidence.
She had spent five weeks in a clinic outside Genoa getting the implants that formed
the structure of her new breasts. The clinic and the doctors there had absolutely
the best reputation in all of Europe. Her own doctor, a charmingly hard-boiled
woman named Alessandra Perrini, had told her that her breasts were abnormally
underdeveloped, and that the enlargement could therefore be performed for
medical reasons.
Recovery from the operation had not been painless, but her breasts looked and felt
completely natural, and by now the scars were almost invisible. She had not
regretted her decision for a second. She was pleased. Even six months later she
could not walk past a mirror with her top off without stopping and feeling glad
that she had improved her quality of life.
During her time at the clinic in Genoa she had also had one of her nine tattoos
removed—a one-inch-long wasp—from the right side of her neck. She liked her
tattoos, especially the dragon on her left shoulder blade. But the wasp was
conspicuous and it made her too easy to remember and identify. Salander did not
want to be remembered or identified. The tattoo had been removed by laser
treatment, and when she ran her index finger over her neck she could feel the
slight scarring. Closer inspection would reveal that her suntanned skin was a shade
lighter where the tattoo had been, but at a glance nothing was noticeable.
Altogether her stay in Genoa had cost 190,000 kronor.
Which she could afford.
She stopped dreaming in front of the mirror and put on her panties and bra. Two
days after she had left the clinic in Genoa she had for the first time in her twenty-five
years gone to a lingerie boutique and bought the garments she had never
needed before. Since then she had turned twenty-six, and now she wore a bra with
a certain amount of satisfaction.
She put on jeans and a black T-shirt with the slogan CONSIDER THIS A FAIR
WARNING. She found her sandals and sun hat and slung a black bag over her
shoulder.
Crossing the lobby, she heard a murmur from a small group of hotel guests at the
front desk. She slowed down and pricked up her ears.
“Just how dangerous is she?” said a black woman with a loud voice and a European
accent. Salander recognized her as one of a charter group from London who had
been there for ten days.
Freddy McBain, the greying reception manager who always greeted Salander with a
friendly smile, looked worried. He was telling them that instructions would be
issued to all guests and that there was no reason to worry as long as they followed
all the instructions to the letter. He was met by a hail of questions.
Salander frowned and went out to the bar, where she found Ella Carmichael behind
the counter.
“What’s all that about?” she said, motioning with her thumb towards the front
desk.
“Matilda is threatening to visit us.”
“Matilda?”
“Matilda is a hurricane that formed off Brazil a few weeks ago and yesterday tore
straight through Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam. No-one’s quite sure what
direction it’s going to take—probably further north towards the States. But if it goes
on following the coast to the west, then Trinidad and Grenada will be smack in its
path. So it might get a bit windy.”
“I thought the hurricane season was over.”
“It is. It’s usually September and October. But these days you never can tell, because
there’s so much trouble with the climate and the greenhouse effect and all that.”
“OK. But when’s Matilda supposed to arrive?”
“Soon.”
“Is there something I should do?”
“Lisbeth, hurricanes are not for playing around with. We had one in the seventies
that caused a lot of destruction here on Grenada. I was eleven years old and lived in
a town up in the Grand Etang on the way to Grenville, and I will never forget that
night.”
“Hmm.”
“But you don’t need to worry. Stay close to the hotel on Saturday. Pack a bag with
things you wouldn’t want to lose—like that computer you’re always playing with—
and be prepared to take it along if we get instructions to go down to the storm
cellar. That’s all.”
“Right.”
“Would you like something to drink?”
“No thanks.”
Salander left without saying goodbye. Ella Carmichael smiled, resigned. It had taken
her a couple of weeks to get used to this odd girl’s peculiar ways and to realize that
she was not being snooty—she was just very different. But she paid for her drinks
without any fuss, stayed relatively sober, kept to herself, and never caused any
trouble.
The traffic on Grenada consisted mainly of imaginatively decorated minibuses that
operated with no particular timetable or other formalities. The shuttle ran during
the daylight hours. After dark it was pretty much impossible to get around without
your own car.
Salander had to wait only a few minutes on the road to St. George’s before one of
the buses pulled up. The driver was a Rasta, and the bus’s sound system was
playing “No Woman No Cry” full blast. She closed her ears, paid her dollar, and
squeezed in next to a substantial woman with grey hair and two boys in school
uniforms.
St. George’s was located on a U-shaped bay that formed the Carenage, the inner
harbour. Around the harbour rose steep hills dotted with houses and old colonial
buildings, with Fort Rupert perched all the way out on the tip of a precipitous cliff.
St. George’s was a compact and tight-knit town with narrow streets and many
alleyways. The houses climbed up every hillside, and there was hardly a flat surface
larger than the combined cricket field and racetrack on the northern edge of the
town.
She got off at the harbour and walked to MacIntyre’s Electronics at the top of a
short, steep slope. Almost all the products sold on Grenada were imported from the
United States or Britain, so they cost twice as much as they did elsewhere, but at
least the shop had air-conditioning.
The extra batteries she had ordered for her Apple PowerBook (G4 titanium with a
seventeen-inch screen) had finally arrived. In Miami she had bought a Palm PDA
with a folding keyboard that she could use for email and easily take with her in her
shoulder bag instead of dragging around her PowerBook, but it was a miserable
substitute for the seventeen-inch screen. The original batteries had deteriorated and
would run for only half an hour before they had to be recharged, which was a
curse when she wanted to sit out on the terrace by the pool, and the electrical
supply on Grenada left a lot to be desired. During the weeks she had been there,
she had experienced two long blackouts. She paid with a credit card in the name of
Wasp Enterprises, stuffed the batteries in her shoulder bag, and headed back out
into the midday heat.
She paid a visit to Barclays Bank and withdrew $300, then went down to the
market and bought a bunch of carrots, half a dozen mangoes, and a big bottle of
mineral water. Her bag was much heavier now, and by the time she got back to the
harbour she was hungry and thirsty. She considered the Nutmeg first, but the
entrance to the restaurant was jammed with people already waiting. She went on
to the quieter Turtleback at the other end of the harbour. There she sat on the
veranda and ordered a plate of calamari and chips with a bottle of Carib, the local
beer. She picked up a discarded copy of the Grenadian Voice and looked through it
for two minutes. The only thing of interest was a dramatic article warning about
the possible arrival of Matilda. The text was illustrated with a photograph showing
a demolished house, a reminder of the devastation wrought by the last big
hurricane to hit the island.
She folded the paper, took a swig from the bottle of Carib, and then she saw the
man from room 32 come out on the veranda from the bar. He had his brown
briefcase in one hand and a glass of Coca-Cola in the other. His eyes swept over her
without recognition before he sat on a bench at the other end of the veranda and
fixed his gaze on the water beyond.
He seemed utterly preoccupied and sat there motionless for seven minutes,
Salander observed, before he raised his glass and took three deep swallows. Then he
put down the glass and resumed staring out to sea. After a while she opened her
bag and took out Dimensions in Mathematics.
All her life Salander had loved puzzles and riddles. When she was nine her mother
gave her a Rubik’s Cube. It had put her abilities to the test for barely forty
frustrating minutes before she understood how it worked. After that she never had
any difficulty solving the puzzle. She had never missed the daily newspapers’
intelligence tests; five strangely shaped figures and the puzzle was how the sixth
one should look. To her, the answer was always obvious.
In elementary school she had learned to add and subtract. Multiplication, division,
and geometry were a natural extension. She could add up the bill in a restaurant,
create an invoice, and calculate the path of an artillery shell fired at a certain speed
and angle. That was easy. But before she read the article in Popular Science she had
never been intrigued by mathematics or even thought about the fact that the
multiplication table was math. It was something she memorized one afternoon at
school, and she never understood why the teacher kept going on about it for the
whole year.
Then, suddenly, she sensed the inexorable logic that must reside behind the
reasoning and the formulas, and that led her to the mathematics section of the
university bookshop. But it was not until she started on Dimensions in
Mathematics that a whole new world opened to her. Mathematics was actually a
logical puzzle with endless variations—riddles that could be solved. The trick was
not to solve arithmetical problems. Five times five would always be twenty-five.
The trick was to understand combinations of the various rules that made it possible
to solve any mathematical problem whatsoever.
Dimensions in Mathematics was not strictly a textbook but rather a 1,200-page
brick about the history of mathematics from the ancient Greeks to modern-day
attempts to understand spherical astronomy. It was considered the bible of math,
in a class with what the Arithmetica of Diophantus had meant (and still did mean)
to serious mathematicians. When she opened Dimensions in Mathematics for the
first time on the terrace of the hotel on Grand Anse Beach, she was enticed into an
enchanted world of figures. This was a book written by an author who was both
pedagogical and able to entertain the reader with anecdotes and astonishing
problems. She could follow mathematics from Archimedes to today’s Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in California. She had taken in the methods they used to solve problems.
Pythagoras’ equation (x2 + y2 = z2), formulated five centuries before Christ, was an
epiphany. At that moment Salander understood the significance of what she had
memorized in secondary school from some of the few classes she had attended. In a
right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of
the other two sides. She was fascinated by Euclid’s discovery in about 300 BC that a
perfect number is always a multiple of two numbers, in which one number is a
power of 2 and the second consists of the difference between the next power of 2
and 1. This was a refinement of Pythagoras’ equation, and she could see the endless
combinations.
6 = 21x (22 - l)
28 = 22x (23 - l)
496 = 24x (25 - l)
8,128 = 26x (27 - l)
She could go on indefinitely without finding any number that would break the rule.
This was a logic that appealed to her sense of the absolute. She advanced through
Archimedes, Newton, Martin Gardner, and a dozen other classical mathematicians
with unmitigated pleasure.
Then she came to the chapter on Pierre de Fermat, whose mathematical enigma,
“Fermat’s Last Theorem,” had dumbfounded her for seven weeks. And that was a
trifling length of time, considering that Fermat had driven mathematicians crazy
for almost four hundred years before an Englishman named Andrew Wiles
succeeded in unravelling the puzzle, as recently as 1993.
Fermat’s theorem was a beguilingly simple task.
Pierre de Fermat was born in 1601 in Beaumont-de-Lomagne in southwestern
France. He was not even a mathematician; he was a civil servant who devoted
himself to mathematics as a hobby. He was regarded as one of the most gifted self-taught mathematicians who ever lived. Like Salander, he enjoyed solving puzzles
and riddles. He found it particularly amusing to tease other mathematicians by
devising problems without supplying the solutions. The philosopher Descartes
referred to Fermat by many derogatory epithets, and his English colleague John
Wallis called him “that damned Frenchman.”
In 1621 a Latin translation was published of Diophantus’ Arithmetica which
contained a complete compilation of the number theories that Pythagoras, Euclid,
and other ancient mathematicians had formulated. It was when Fermat was
studying Pythagoras’ equation that in a burst of pure genius he created his
immortal problem. He formulated a variant of Pythagoras’ equation. Instead of (x2 +
y2 = z2), Fermat converted the square to a cube, (x3 + y3 = z3).
The problem was that the new equation did not seem to have any solution with
whole numbers. What Fermat had thus done, by an academic tweak, was to
transform a formula which had an infinite number of perfect solutions into a blind
alley that had no solution at all. His theorem was just that—Fermat claimed that
nowhere in the infinite universe of numbers was there any whole number in which
a cube could be expressed as the sum of two cubes, and that this was general for
all numbers having a power of more than 2, that is, precisely Pythagoras’ equation.
Other mathematicians swiftly agreed that this was correct. Through trial and error
they were able to confirm that they could not find a number that disproved
Fermat’s theorem. The problem was simply that even if they counted until the end
of time, they would never be able to test all existing numbers—they are infinite,
after all—and consequently the mathematicians could not be 100 percent certain
that the next number would not disprove Fermat’s theorem. Within mathematics,
assertions must always be proven mathematically and expressed in a valid and
scientifically correct formula. The mathematician must be able to stand on a
podium and say the words This is so because …
Fermat, true to form, sorely tested his colleagues. In the margin of his copy of
Arithmetica the genius penned the problem and concluded with the lines Cuius rei
demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet. These
lines became immortalized in the history of mathematics: I have a truly marvellous
demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
If his intention had been to madden his peers, then he succeeded. Since 1637 almost
every self-respecting mathematician has spent time, sometimes a great deal of time,
trying to find Fermat’s proof. Generations of thinkers had failed until finally Andrew
Wiles came up with the proof everyone had been waiting for. By then he had
pondered the riddle for twenty-five years, the last ten of which he worked almost
full-time on the problem.
Salander was at a loss.
She was actually not interested in the answer. It was the process of solution that
was the point. When someone put a riddle in front of her, she solved it. Before she
understood the principles of reasoning, the number mysteries took a long time to
solve, but she always arrived at the correct answer before she looked it up.
So she took out a piece of paper and began scribbling figures when she read
Fermat’s theorem. But she failed to find a proof for it.
She disdained the idea of looking at the answer key, so she bypassed the section
that gave Wiles’ solution. Instead she finished her reading of Dimensions and
confirmed that none of the other problems formulated in the book presented any
overwhelming difficulties for her. Then she returned to Fermat’s riddle day after
day with increasing irritation, wondering what was Fermat’s “marvellous proof.”
She went from one dead end to another.
She looked up when the man from room 32 stood and walked towards the exit. He
had been sitting there for two hours and ten minutes.
Ella Carmichael set the glass on the bar. She had long since realized that crappy
pink drinks with stupid umbrellas were not Salander’s style. She always ordered the
same drink, rum and Coke. Except for one evening when she had been in an odd
mood and got so drunk that Ella had to call the porter to carry her to her room,
her normal consumption consisted of caffè latte and a few drinks. Or Carib beer. As
always, she sat at the far right end of the bar and opened a book that looked to
have complicated lines of numbers in it, which in Ella’s eyes was a funny choice of
reading for a girl of her age.
She also noticed that Salander did not appear to have the least interest in being
picked up. The few lonely men who had made advances had been rebuffed kindly
but firmly, and in one case not very kindly. Chris MacAllen, the man dispatched so
brusquely, was a local wastrel who could have used a good thrashing. So Ella was
not too bothered when he somehow stumbled and fell into the pool after bothering
Miss Salander for an entire evening. To MacAllen’s credit, he did not hold a grudge.
He came back the following night, all sobered up, and offered to buy Salander a
beer, which, after a brief hesitation, she accepted. From then on they greeted each
other politely when they saw each other in the bar.
“Everything OK?”
Salander nodded and took the glass. “Any news about Matilda?”
“Still headed our way. It could be a real bad weekend.”
“When will we know?”
“Actually not before she’s passed by. She could head straight for Grenada and then
decide to swing north at the last moment.”
Then they heard a laugh that was a little too loud and turned to see the lady from
room 32, apparently amused by something her husband had said.
“Who are they?”
“Dr. Forbes? They’re Americans from Austin, Texas.” Ella Carmichael said the word
Americans with a certain distaste.
“I could tell they’re Americans, but what are they doing here? Is he a GP?”
“No, not that kind of doctor. He’s here for the Santa Maria Foundation.”
“What’s that?”
“They support education for talented children. He’s a fine man. He’s discussing a
proposal for a new high school in St. George’s with the Ministry of Education.”
“He’s a fine man who beats his wife,” Salander said.
Ella gave Salander a sharp look and went to the other end of the bar to serve some
local customers.
Salander stayed for ten minutes with her nose in Dimensions. She had known that
she had a photographic memory since before she reached puberty, and because of
it she was very different from her classmates. She had never revealed this to
anyone—except to Blomkvist in a moment of weakness. She already knew the text
of Dimensions in Mathematics by heart and was dragging the book around mainly
because it represented a physical link to Fermat, as if the book had become some
kind of talisman.
But this evening she could not concentrate on Fermat or his theorem. Instead she
saw in her mind Dr. Forbes sitting motionless, gazing at the same distant point in
the sea at the Carenage.
She could not have explained why she knew that something was not right.
Finally she closed the book, went back to her room, and booted up her PowerBook.
Surfing the Internet did not call for any thinking. The hotel did not have broadband,
but she had a built-in modem that she could hook up to her Panasonic mobile
phone and with that setup she could send and receive email. She typed a message
to Plague_xyz_666@hotmail.com:
No broadband here. Need info on a Dr. Forbes with the Santa Maria Foundation,
and his wife, living in Austin, Texas. $500 to whoever does the research. Wasp.
She attached her public PGP key, encrypted the message with Plague’s PGP key, and
sent it. Then she looked at the clock and saw that it was just past 7:30 p.m.
She turned off her computer, locked her door, and walked four hundred yards along
the beach, past the road to St. George’s, and knocked on the door of a shack behind
the Coconut.
George Bland was sixteen and a student. He intended to become a lawyer or a
doctor or possibly an astronaut, and he was just as skinny as Salander and only a
little taller. Salander had met him on the beach the day after she moved to Grand
Anse. She had sat down in the shade under some palms to watch the children
playing football by the water. She was engrossed in Dimensions when the boy came
and sat in the sand a few yards away from her, apparently without noticing she
was there. She observed him in silence. A thin black boy in sandals, black jeans, and
a white shirt.
He too had opened a book and immersed himself in it. Like her, he was reading a
mathematics book—Basics 4. He began to scribble in an exercise book. Five minutes
later, when Salander cleared her throat, he jumped up with a start. He apologized
for bothering her and was on the brink of being gone when she asked him if what
he was working on were complicated formulas.
Algebra. After a minute she had shown him an error in his calculation. After half an
hour they had finished his homework. After an hour they had gone through the
whole of the next chapter in his textbook and she had explained the trick behind
the arithmetical operations as though she were his tutor. He had looked at her
awestruck. After two hours he told her that his mother lived in Toronto, that his
father lived in Grenville on the other side of the island, and that he himself lived in
a shack a little way along the beach. He was the youngest in the family, with three
older sisters.
Salander found his company surprisingly relaxing. The situation was unusual. She
hardly ever began conversations with strangers just to talk. It was not a matter of
shyness. For her, a conversation had a straightforward function. How do I get to
the pharmacy? or How much does the hotel room cost? Conversation also had a
professional function. When she worked as a researcher for Dragan Armansky at
Milton Security, she had never minded having a long conversation if it was to ferret
out facts.
On the other hand, she disliked personal discussions, which always led to snooping
around in areas she considered private. How old are you? Guess. Do you like Britney
Spears? Who? What do you think of Carl Larsson’s paintings? I’ve never given them
a thought. Are you a lesbian? Piss off.
This boy was gawky and self-conscious, but he was polite and tried to have an
intelligent conversation without competing with her or poking his nose into her
life. Like her, he seemed lonely. He appeared to accept without puzzlement that a
goddess of mathematics had descended onto Grand Anse Beach, and with pleasure
that she would keep him company. They got up as the sun sank to the horizon.
They walked together towards her hotel, and he pointed out the shack that was his
student quarters. Shyly he asked if he might invite her to tea.
The shack contained a table that was cobbled together, two chairs, a bed, and a
wooden cabinet for clothes. The only lighting was a desk lamp with a cable that
ran to the Coconut. He had a camp stove. He offered her a meal of rice and
vegetables, which he served on plastic plates. Boldly he even offered her a smoke of
the local forbidden substance, which she also accepted.
Salander could not help noticing that he was affected by her presence and did not
know how he should treat her. She, on a whim, decided to let him seduce her. It
developed into a painfully roundabout procedure in which he certainly understood
her signals but had no idea how to react to them. Finally she lost patience, pushed
him roughly onto the bed, and took off her shirt and jeans.
It was the first time she had shown herself naked to anyone since the operation in
Italy. She had left the clinic with a feeling of panic. It took her a long while to
realize that no-one was staring at her. Normally she didn’t give a damn what other
people thought, and she did not worry about why she felt nervous now.
Young Bland had been a perfect initiation for her new self. When at last (after some
encouragement) he managed to unfasten her bra, he immediately switched off the
lamp before undressing himself. Salander could tell that he was shy, and she turned
the lamp back on. She watched his reactions closely as he began to touch her
clumsily. Only much later did she relax, certain that he thought her breasts were
natural. On the other hand, it was unlikely he had much to compare them to.
She had not planned to get herself a teenage lover on Grenada. It had been an
impulse, and when she left him late that night she didn’t consider going back. But
the next day she ran into him on the beach and realized that the clumsy boy was
pleasant company. For the seven weeks she lived on Grenada, George Bland became
a regular part of her life. They did not spend time together during the day, but they
spent the hours before sundown on the beach and the evenings alone in his shack.
She was aware that when they walked together they looked like two teenagers.
Sweet sixteen.
He evidently thought that life had become much more interesting. He had met a
woman who was teaching him about mathematics and eroticism.
He opened the door and smiled delightedly at her.
“Would you like company?” she said.
Salander left the shack just after two in the morning. She had a warm feeling in her
body and strolled along the beach instead of taking the road to the Keys Hotel. She
walked alone in the dark, knowing that Bland would be a hundred yards behind.
He always did that. She had never slept over at his place, and he often protested
that she, a woman all alone, should not be walking back to her hotel at night. He
insisted it was his duty to accompany her back to the hotel. Especially when it was
very late, as it often was. Salander would listen to his objections and then cut the
discussion off with a firm no. I’ll walk where I want, when I want. And no, I don’t
want an escort. The first time she caught him following her she was really annoyed.
But now she thought his wanting to protect her was rather sweet, so she
pretended that she did not know he was there behind her or that he would turn
back when he saw her go in the door of the hotel.
She wondered what he would do if she were attacked.
She would make use of the hammer she had bought at a hardware store and kept
in the outside pocket of her shoulder bag. There were not so many physical threats
that could not be countered with a decent hammer, Salander thought.
There was a full moon and the stars were sparkling. Salander looked up and
identified Regulus in Leo near the horizon. She was almost at the hotel terrace
when she stopped short. She had caught sight of someone near the waterline below
the hotel. It was the first time she had seen a living soul on the beach after dark.
He was almost a hundred yards off, but Salander knew at once who it was there in
the moonlight.
It was the fine Dr. Forbes from room 32.
She took three quick steps into the shadow of a tree. When she turned her head,
Bland was invisible too. The figure at the water’s edge was walking slowly back and
forth. He was smoking a cigarette. Every so often he would stop and bend down as
if to examine the sand. This pantomime continued for twenty minutes before he
turned and with rapid steps walked to the hotel’s beach entrance and vanished.
Salander waited for a few minutes before she went down to where Dr. Forbes had
been. She made a slow semicircle, inspecting the sand. All she could make out was
pebbles and some shells. After a few minutes she broke off her search and went
back to the hotel.
On her balcony, she leaned over the railing and peered in her neighbours’ door. All
was quiet. The evening’s argument was obviously over. After a while she took from
her shoulder bag some papers to roll a joint from the supply that Bland had given
her. She sat down on a balcony chair and gazed out at the dark water of the
Caribbean as she smoked and thought. She felt like a radar installation on high alert.
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