CHAPTER 30
Thursday, April 7
Blomkvist looked at the entrance door of Fiskargatan 9. It was one of Stockholm’s
most exclusive addresses. He put the key in the lock and it turned perfectly. The list
of residents in the lobby was no help. Blomkvist assumed it would be mostly
corporate apartments, but there seemed to be one or two private residences among
them. It hardly surprised him that Salander’s name was not listed, yet it still
seemed unlikely that this would be her hideout.
He walked up floor by floor, reading the nameplates on the doors. None of them
rang a bell. Then he got to the top floor and read V. KULLA.
Blomkvist slapped his forehead. He had to smile. The choice of name may not have
been intended to make fun of him personally; it was more likely some private
ironic reflection of Salander’s—but where else should Kalle Blomkvist, nicknamed
for an Astrid Lindgren character, look for her than at Pippi Longstocking’s Villa
Villekulla?
He rang the doorbell and waited a minute. Then he took out the keys and
unfastened the dead bolt and the bottom lock.
The instant he opened the door, the burglar alarm device was activated.
Salander’s mobile began beeping. She was near Glanshammar just outside Örebro.
She braked and pulled onto the shoulder. She took her Palm from her jacket pocket
and plugged it into her phone.
Fifteen seconds earlier someone had opened the door to her apartment. The alarm
was not connected to any security company. Its only purpose was to alert her that
someone had broken in or had opened the door in some other way. After thirty
seconds an alarm bell would go off and the uninvited visitor would get an
unpleasant surprise in the form of a paint bomb hidden in a fake fuse box next to
the door. She smiled in anticipation and counted down the seconds.
Blomkvist stared in frustration at the alarm display by the door. For some reason he
hadn’t even thought that the apartment might have an alarm. He watched the
digital clock counting down. Millennium’s alarm was triggered if someone failed to
key in the correct four-digit code within thirty seconds, and shortly thereafter a
couple of muscular guys from a security company would come through the door.
His first impulse was to close the door and make a quick exit from the building. But
he just stood there, frozen to the spot.
Four digits. Impossible to guess the code at random.
25–24–23–22…
Damned Pippi Long…
19–18 …
What code would you use?
15–14–13 …
He felt his panic growing.
10–9–8 …
Then he raised his hand and desperately punched in the only number he could
think of: 9277. The numbers that corresponded to the letters W-A-S-P on the keypad.
To his astonishment the countdown stopped with six seconds to go. Then the alarm
beeped one last time before the display was reset to zero and a green light came
on.
Salander opened her eyes wide. She thought she had to be seeing things and
actually shook her PDA, which she realized was irrational. The countdown had
stopped six seconds before the paint bomb was supposed to explode. And a second
later the display reset to zero.
Impossible.
No other person in the world knew the code.
How could it be possible? The police? No. Zala? Inconceivable.
She dialled a number on her mobile and waited for the surveillance camera to
connect and begin to send low-resolution images through.
The camera was hidden in what looked like a smoke detector in the hall ceiling,
and it took a low-res photograph every second. She played back the sequence from
zero, the moment the door was opened and the alarm activated. Then a lopsided
smile spread across her face as she looked down at Mikael Blomkvist, who for half
a minute acted out a jerky pantomime before he finally punched in the code and
then leaned on the doorjamb looking as though he had just avoided having a heart
attack.
Kalle Fucking Blomkvist had tracked her down.
He had the keys she had dropped on Lundagatan. He was smart enough to
remember that Wasp was her handle on the Net. And if he had found the
apartment, then he had probably also worked out that it was owned by Wasp
Enterprises. As she watched he began to move jerkily down the hall and
disappeared from the camera’s view.
Shit. How could I have been so predictable? And why did I drop those keys?… Now
her every secret lay open to Blomkvist’s prying eyes.
After thinking about it for a couple of minutes she decided that it no longer made
any difference. She had erased the hard drive. That was the important thing. It
could even be to her advantage that he was the one to have found her hideout. He
already knew more of her secrets than anyone else did. Practical Pig would do the
right thing. He would not sell her out. She hoped. She put the car in drive and
pressed on, deep in thought, towards Göteborg.
Eriksson ran into Paolo Roberto in the stairwell to Millennium’s offices when she
arrived at 8:30. She recognized him at once, introduced herself, and let him in. He
had a bad limp. She smelled coffee and knew that Berger was already there.
“Hello, Erika. Thanks for agreeing to see me at such short notice,” the boxer said.
Berger studied the impressive collection of bruises and lumps on his face before she
leaned forward and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“You look like shit,” she said.
“I’ve broken my nose before. Where are you keeping Blomkvist?”
“He’s out somewhere playing detective, looking for leads. As usual it’s impossible to
get hold of him. Except for a strange email last night I haven’t heard from him
since yesterday morning. Thank you for … well, thanks.”
She pointed to his face.
Paolo Roberto laughed.
“Would you like coffee? You said you had something to tell me. Malin, join us.”
They sat in the comfortable chairs in Berger’s office.
“It’s that big blond fucker I had the fight with. I told Mikael that his boxing wasn’t
worth a rotten lingonberry But the funny thing was, he kept assuming the
defensive position with his fists and circled around as if he were a boxer. It seemed
as if he had actually had some sort of training.”
“Mikael mentioned that on the phone yesterday,” Eriksson said.
“I couldn’t stop thinking about it, so yesterday when I got home I sat down and
sent out emails to boxing clubs all over Europe. I described what had happened and
gave as detailed a description as I could of the guy.”
“Did you have any luck?”
“I think I got a nibble.”
He put a faxed photograph on the table in front of Berger and Eriksson. It looked to
have been taken during a training session at a boxing club. Two boxers were
standing listening to instructions from a heavyset older man in a narrow-brimmed
leather hat and tracksuit. Half a dozen people were hanging around the ring
listening. In the background stood a large man who looked like a skinhead. A circle
had been drawn around him with a marker pen.
“The picture is seventeen years old. The guy in the background is Ronald
Niedermann. He was eighteen when the picture was taken, so he should be about
thirty-five now. That fits with the giant that kidnapped Miriam Wu. I can’t say with
100 percent certainty that it’s him. The picture is a little too old and it’s poor
quality. But I can say that he looks quite similar.”
“Where did you get the picture?”
“I got an answer from Hans Münster, a veteran trainer at Dynamic in Hamburg.
Ronald Niedermann boxed for them for a year in the late eighties. Or rather, he
tried to box for them. I got the email first thing this morning and called Münster
before I came here. To sum up what Münster said: Niedermann is from Hamburg
and hung out with a skinhead gang in the eighties. He has a brother a few years
older, a very talented boxer, and it was through him that he joined the club.
Niedermann had fearsome strength and a physique that was almost unparalleled.
Münster said that he’d never seen anyone hit so hard, not even among the elite.
They measured the weight of his punch one time and he went right off the scale.”
“It sounds as though he could have made a career in the ring,” Berger said.
Paolo Roberto shook his head. “According to Münster he was impossible, for several
reasons. First, he couldn’t learn to box. He would stand still throwing haymakers.
He was phenomenally clumsy—that fits the guy I fought in Nykvarn—but what was
worse, he didn’t understand his own strength. Now and then he’d land a punch
that would cause a horrible injury during sparring practice. There were broken
noses and jaws—a whole series of unnecessary injuries. They just couldn’t keep him
around.”
“So he could box, but not really. Is that it?” Eriksson said.
“Exactly. But the reason for him stopping was medical.”
“How do you mean?”
“He was apparently invulnerable. It didn’t matter how many punches he took, he
just shook them off and kept fighting. It turned out that he suffers from a very rare
condition called congenital analgesia. I looked it up. It’s an inherited genetic defect
that means the transmitter substance in his nerve synapses doesn’t function
properly. Or in lay terms, he can’t feel pain.”
“That sounds like a gold mine for a boxer.”
Paolo Roberto shook his head once more. “On the contrary. It can be a life-threatening disorder. Most people with congenital analgesia die relatively young,
between twenty and twenty-five. Pain is the body’s warning system that
something’s wrong. If you put your hand on a red-hot burner, it hurts and you
snatch it away. But if you have this disease you don’t do anything until you start
smelling burned flesh.”
Eriksson and Berger looked at each other.
“Are you serious?” Berger said.
“Absolutely. Niedermann can’t feel a thing, and he goes around as if he’s had a
massive dose of local anaesthesia twenty-four hours a day. He’s managed to deal
with it because he has another genetic feature that compensates for it. He has an
extraordinary build with an extremely strong skeleton, which makes him almost
invulnerable. His raw strength is damn near unique. And above all, he must heal
easily.”
“I’m beginning to understand what an interesting boxing match it must have been.”
“It certainly was that. I wouldn’t want to do it again. The only thing that made an
impression on him was when Miriam Wu kicked him in the balls. He actually fell to
his knees for a second … which must be because there’s some sort of physical
reaction connected to a blow of that type, since he doesn’t feel any pain. And
believe me—even I would have collapsed if she had kicked me like that.”
“So how did you end up beating him?”
“People with this disease can in fact be injured just like anyone else. Forget that
Niedermann seems to have bones of concrete. But when I whacked him with a
plank on the back of his head he dropped like a rock. He was probably concussed.”
Berger looked at Eriksson.
“I’ll call Mikael,” Eriksson said.
Blomkvist heard his mobile go off, but he was so stunned that he did not answer
until the fifth ring.
“Hi, it’s Malin. Paolo Roberto thinks he’s identified the giant.”
“That’s good,” Blomkvist said absentmindedly.
“Where are you?”
“That’s hard to say.”
“You sound funny.”
“Sorry. What did you say?”
Eriksson summed up Paolo Roberto’s story.
“Follow up on it,” Blomkvist said, “and see if you can find him in some database. I
think it’s urgent. Call me on my mobile.”
To Eriksson’s surprise, he disconnected without even saying goodbye.
Blomkvist was standing at that moment by a window, looking out at a magnificent
view that stretched far from Gamla Stan towards Saltsjön. He felt numb. There was
a kitchen off the hall to the right of the front door. Then there was a living room,
an office, a bedroom, and even a small guest room that seemed not to have been
used. The mattress was still in its plastic wrapper and there were no sheets. All the
furniture was brand-new, straight from IKEA.
What floored Blomkvist was that Salander had bought the pied-à-terre that had
belonged to Percy Barnevik, a captain of industry. The apartment was about 3,800
square feet and worth twenty-five million kronor.
Blomkvist wandered through deserted, almost eerily empty corridors and rooms
with patterned parquet floors of different kinds of wood, and Tricia Guild wallpaper
of the type that Berger had at one time coveted. At the centre of the apartment
was a wonderfully bright living room with an open fireplace, but Salander seemed
never to have had a fire. There was an enormous balcony with a fantastic view.
There was a laundry room, a sauna, a gym, storage rooms, and a bathroom with a
king-size bath. There was even a wine cellar, which was empty except for an
unopened bottle of Quinta do Noval port—Nacional!—from 1976. Blomkvist struggled
to imagine Salander with a glass of port in her hand. An elegant card indicated that
it had been a moving-in present from the estate agent.
The kitchen contained all manner of equipment, with a shiny French gourmet stove
with a gas oven as the focus. Blomkvist had never before set eyes on a La Cornue
Château 120. Salander probably used it for boiling tea water.
On the other hand he admired with awe the espresso machine on its own separate
table. She had a Jura Impressa X7 with an attached milk cooler. The machine looked
barely used and had probably been in the kitchen when she bought the apartment.
Blomkvist knew that a Jura was the espresso equivalent of a Rolls-Royce—a
professional machine for domestic use that cost in the neighbourhood of 70,000
kronor. He had an espresso machine that he had bought at John Wall, which had
cost around 3,500 kronor—one of the few extravagances he had allowed himself for
his own household, and a fraction of the grandeur of Salander’s machine.
The refrigerator contained an open milk carton, some cheese, butter, caviar, and a
half-empty jar of pickled gherkins. The kitchen cupboard contained four half-empty
jars of vitamins, tea bags, coffee for an ordinary coffeemaker, two loaves of bread,
and a packet of crispbreads. On the kitchen table was a bowl of apples. There were
three ham pies and a fish casserole in the freezer. That was all the food he found in
the apartment. In the trash under the counter next to the stove he saw several
empty packages for Billy’s Pan Pizza.
The arrangement was all out of proportion. Salander had stolen several billion
kronor and bought herself an apartment with space for an entire court. But she
only needed the three rooms she had furnished. The other eighteen rooms were
empty.
Blomkvist ended his tour in her office. There were no flowers anywhere. There
were no paintings or even posters on the walls. There were no rugs or wall
hangings. He could not see a single decorative bowl, candlestick, or even a
knickknack that had been saved for sentimental reasons.
Blomkvist felt as if someone were squeezing his heart. He felt that he had to find
Salander and hold her close.
She would probably bite him if he tried.
Fucking Zalachenko.
Then he sat down at her desk and opened the folder with Björck’s report from 1991.
He did not read it all, but skimmed through it, trying to absorb the essentials.
He booted up her PowerBook with the 17-inch screen, 200 GB hard drive, and 1,000
MB of RAM. It was empty. She had wiped it. That was ominous.
He opened her desk drawer and found a 9 mm Colt 1911 Government single-action
with a fully loaded magazine, seven rounds. It was the pistol Salander had taken
from the journalist Sandström, though Blomkvist knew nothing about that. He had
not yet reached the letter S on the list of johns.
Then he found a DVD marked BJURMAN.
He stuck it into his iBook and watched its contents with horror. He sat in stunned
silence as he saw Salander beaten up, raped, almost murdered. The film seemed to
have been made with a hidden camera. He did not watch it all but skipped from
one section to the next, each worse than the last.
Bjurman.
Salander’s guardian had raped her, and she had documented the event to the final
detail. A digital date showed that the film had been recorded two years earlier. That
was before he met her. Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place.
Björck and Bjurman together with Zalachenko in the seventies.
Zalachenko and Salander and a Molotov cocktail made from a milk carton in the
early nineties.
Then Bjurman again, now her guardian, having replaced Palmgren. The circle had
been closed. Bjurman had attacked his ward. He had treated her as a mentally ill,
defenceless girl, but Salander was anything but defenceless. She was the girl who at
the age of twelve had gone to war with a hit man who had defected from the GRU,
and she had crippled him for life.
Salander was the woman who hated men who hate women.
He thought back to the time when he had come to know her in Hedestad. It must
have been a matter of months after the rape. He could not recall that she had
hinted by so much as a single word that any such thing had happened to her. She
had not revealed much at all about herself. Blomkvist could not guess what she had
done to Bjurman—but she had not killed him. Oddly enough. Otherwise Bjurman
would have been dead two years ago. She must have been controlling him in some
way and for some purpose that he could not begin to understand. Then he realized
that he had the means of her control right there on the desk. The DVD. As long as
she had that, Bjurman was her helpless slave. And Bjurman had turned to the man
he supposed was an ally. Zalachenko. Her worst enemy. Her father.
Then a whole chain of events. Bjurman had been shot first, then Svensson and
Johansson.
But how? What could have made Svensson such a threat?
And suddenly he knew what must have happened in Enskede.
Blomkvist found a piece of paper on the floor beneath the window. Salander had
printed out a page, crumpled it into a ball, and tossed it away. He smoothed it out.
It was from Aftonbladet ’s online edition about the kidnapping of Miriam Wu.
He did not know what role Wu had played in the drama—if any—but she had been
one of Salander’s very few friends. Maybe her only friend. Salander had given her
old apartment to her. Now she was lying in the hospital, badly beaten.
Niedermann and Zalachenko.
First her mother. Then Miriam Wu. Salander must be crazy with hatred.
This was one provocation too many.
And now she was on the hunt.
At lunchtime Armansky received a call from the rehabilitation home in Ersta. He
had expected to hear from Palmgren much earlier and had avoided making contact
with him. He’d been afraid that he would have to report that Salander was guilty
beyond all doubt. Now at least he could tell him that there was in fact reasonable
doubt of her guilt.
“How far did you get?” Palmgren said without beating about the bush.
“With what?”
“With your investigation of Salander.”
“And what makes you think I’m doing any such investigation?”
“Don’t waste my time, Dragan.” Armansky sighed. “You’re right.”
“I want you to come and see me,” Palmgren said. “I can come this weekend.”
“Not good enough. I want you to come tonight. We have a great deal to discuss.”
Blomkvist had made himself coffee and a sandwich in Salander’s kitchen. He half
hoped to hear her keys in the door. But he was not optimistic. The empty hard
drive in her PowerBook told him that she had already left her hideout for good. He
had found her apartment too late.
At 2:30 in the afternoon he was still sitting at Salander’s desk. He had read Björck’s
“non-report” three times. It had been formulated as a memo to an unnamed
superior. The recommendation was simple: get a pliable psychiatrist who would
admit Salander to the children’s psychiatric clinic. The girl was disturbed, as was
clearly demonstrated by her behaviour.
Blomkvist was going to devote very particular attention to Björck and Teleborian in
the coming days. He was looking forward to it. His mobile rang and interrupted his
train of thought.
“Hi again. It’s Malin. I think I’ve got something.”
“What?”
“There’s no Ronald Niedermann in the social security records in Sweden. He’s not in
any telephone book or tax records or on the vehicle licencing database, or
anywhere else. But listen to this. In 1998 a corporation was registered with the
Patent Office. It’s called KAB Import AB and has a P.O. box address in Göteborg. The
company imports electronics. The chairman of the board is Karl Axel Bodin, hence
KAB, born in 1941.”
“It doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Not for me either. There’s also an accountant on the board who’s registered at a
couple of dozen other companies. He seems to be one of those nominal finance
directors that small companies need. The company has been more or less dormant
since it was set up. But then the third member of the board is an R. Niedermann.
He doesn’t have a social security number in Sweden. He was born on January 18,
1970, and is listed as the company’s representative in the German market.”
“Good work, Malin. Very good. Do we have an address apart from the P.O. box?”
“No, but I’ve tracked down Karl Axel Bodin. He’s registered in West Sweden and
lives at the address for P.O. box 612 in Gosseberga. I looked it up; it seems to be a
property in the country not far from Nossebro, northeast of Göteborg.”
“What do we know about him?”
“He declared an income of 260,000 kronor two years ago. According to our friend
on the police force, he has no criminal record. He has a licence for a moose rifle
and a shotgun. He has two cars, a Ford and a Saab, both older models. No points on
his licence. He’s unmarried and calls himself a farmer.”
“A man about whom we know nothing, who has no police record.” Blomkvist
thought for a few moments. He had to make a decision.
“One more thing. Dragan Armansky called several times looking for you.”
“Thanks, Malin. I’ll call you later.”
“Mikael… is everything OK with you?”
“No, everything isn’t OK, but I’ll be in touch.”
As a good citizen he ought to call Bublanski. If he did, he would either have to tell
him the truth about Salander or end up in a muddled situation of half-truths and
withheld facts. But that was not the real problem.
Salander was out looking for Niedermann and Zalachenko. He had no idea how far
she had gotten, but if he and Eriksson could find an address for P.O. box 612 in
Gosseberga, there was no doubt that Salander could too. It was very likely that she
was heading to Gosseberga. That was the natural next step.
If he called the police and told them where Niedermann was hiding, he’d have to
tell them that Salander was probably on her way there. She was being sought for
three murders and the shooting in Stallarholmen, which would mean that the
national armed response team or some equivalent would be tasked with taking her
in.
And Salander would no doubt put up a violent resistance.
Blomkvist got a pen and paper and made a list of things he could not or would not
want to tell the police.
First the address in Mosebacke.
Salander had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure the privacy of her apartment.
This was where she had her life and her secrets. He was not going to give her away.
Then he wrote Bjurman and added a question mark after the name.
He glanced at the DVD on the desk. Bjurman had raped Salander. He had nearly
killed her. He had outrageously abused his position as her guardian. He should be
exposed for the swine he was. But there was an ethical dilemma here. Salander had
not told the police. Did she want to be exposed in the media by a police
investigation in which the most harrowing, intimate details would be leaked in a
matter of hours? The DVD was proof, and stills from it would probably end up in
the evening papers.
It was up to Salander to decide how she wanted to proceed. But if he had been able
to track down her apartment, sooner or later the police would do so too. He put
the DVD in his bag.
Then he wrote Björck’s report. In 1991 it had been stamped top secret. It shed light
on everything that had happened. It named Zalachenko and made clear Björck’s
role, and together with the list of johns from Svensson’s computer it would give
Björck some anxious hours facing Bublanski. And in light of the correspondence,
Teleborian would find himself in deep shit too.
The documents would lead the police to Gosseberga, but at least he would have a
head start.
He started Word and wrote in outline form the key facts he had discovered during
the past twenty-four hours from his conversations with Björck and Palmgren, and
from the material he had found at Salander’s place. It took him about an hour. He
burned the document onto a CD along with his own research.
He wondered whether he ought to check in with Armansky, but thought the hell
with it. He had enough balls to juggle already.
Blomkvist walked into Millennium and went straight to Berger’s office.
“His name is Zalachenko,” he said without even saying hello. “He’s a former Soviet
hit man from one of the intelligence services. He defected in 1976 and was granted
asylum in Sweden and given a salary by Säpo. After the end of the Soviet Union he
became, like many others, a full-time gangster. Now he’s involved in sex trafficking
and smuggling weapons and drugs.”
Berger put down her pen. “Why am I not surprised that the KGB is popping up in
the action?”
“It’s not the KGB. It’s the GRU. The military intelligence service.”
“So it’s serious.”
Blomkvist nodded.
“You mean he’s the one who murdered Dag and Mia?”
“It wasn’t him, no. He sent someone. Ronald Niedermann, the monster that Malin
has been finding out about.”
“Can you prove this?”
“More or less. Some of it is guesswork. But Bjurman was murdered because he
asked Zalachenko for help in dealing with Lisbeth.”
Blomkvist told her about the DVD Salander had left in her desk.
“Zalachenko is her father. Bjurman worked formally for Säpo in the mid-seventies
and was one of those who made Zalachenko officially welcome when he defected.
Later Bjurman became a lawyer with his own practice and a full-time crook, doing
jobs for an elite group within the Security Police. I would think there’s an inner
circle that meets now and then in the men’s sauna to control the world and keep
the secret about Zalachenko. I’m guessing that the rest of Säpo has never even
heard of the bastard. Lisbeth threatened to crack the secret wide open. So they
locked her up in a children’s psychiatric unit.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Oh, but it is,” Blomkvist said. “Lisbeth wasn’t especially manageable then, nor is
she now … but since she was twelve years old she’s been a threat to national
security.”
He gave her a summary of the story.
“This is quite a bit to digest,” Berger said. “And Dag and Mia…”
“Were murdered because Dag discovered the link between Bjurman and
Zalachenko.”
“So what happens now? We have to tell the police, don’t we?”
“Parts of it, but not all. I’ve copied the significant information onto this disk as
backup, just in case. Lisbeth is looking for Zalachenko. I’m going to try to find her.
Nothing of this must be shared with anybody.”
“Mikael… I don’t like this. We can’t withhold information in a murder
investigation.”
“And we’re not going to. I intend to call Bublanski. But my guess is that Lisbeth is
on her way to Gosseberga. She’s still being sought for three murders, and if we call
the police they’ll unleash their armed response team and backup weapons with
hunting ammunition, and there’s a real risk that she would resist arrest. And then
anything could happen.” He stopped and smiled grimly. “If nothing else, we ought
to keep the police out of it so that the armed response team doesn’t come to a
sticky end. I have to find her first.”
Berger looked dubious.
“I don’t intend to reveal Lisbeth’s secrets. Bublanski will have to figure those out for
himself. I want you to do me a favour. This folder contains Björck’s report from 1991
and some correspondence between Björck and Teleborian. I want you to make a
copy and offer it to Bublanski or Modig. I’m leaving for Göteborg in twenty
minutes.”
“Mikael…”
“I know. But I’m on Lisbeth’s side through it all.”
Berger pressed her lips together and said nothing. Then she nodded.
“Be careful,” she said, but he had already left.
I should go with him, she thought. That was the only decent thing to do. But she
still hadn’t told him that she was going to leave Millennium and that it was all
over, no matter what happened. She took the folder and headed for the
photocopier.
The box was in a post office in a shopping centre. Salander didn’t know Göteborg,
nor where in the city she was, but she found the post office and positioned herself
in a café where she could keep watch on the box through a gap in a window where
there was a poster advertising the Svensk Kassatjänst, the improved Swedish postal
system.
Irene Nesser wore more discreet makeup than Lisbeth Salander. She had some silly
necklaces on and was reading Crime and Punishment, which she had found in a
bookshop one street away. She took her time, occasionally turning a page. She’d
begun her surveillance at lunch time and had no idea whether anyone came
regularly to pick up the mail, whether it might be daily or every other week,
whether it had already been collected earlier in the day, or whether anyone ever
turned up at all. But it was her only lead, and she drank a caffè latte while she
waited.
She was about to doze off when she suddenly saw the door to the box being
opened. She glanced at the clock. A quarter to two. Lucky as shit.
She got up quickly and walked over to the window, where she spotted someone in
a black leather jacket leaving the area where the boxes were. She caught up with
him on the street outside. He was a thin young man in his twenties. He walked
round the corner to a Renault and unlocked the door. Salander memorized the
licence plate number and ran back to her Corolla, which was parked only a
hundred yards away on the same street. She caught up with the car as it turned
onto Linnégatan. She followed him down Avenyn and up towards Nordstan.
• • •
Blomkvist arrived at Central Station in time to catch the X2000 train at 5:10 p.m. He
bought a ticket on board with his credit card, took a seat in the restaurant car, and
ordered a late lunch.
He felt a gnawing uneasiness in the pit of his stomach and was afraid he had set off
too late. He prayed that Salander would call him, but he knew that she wouldn’t.
She had done her best to kill Zalachenko in 1991. Now, after all these years, he had
struck back.
Palmgren had delivered a prescient analysis. Salander had experienced personally
that it was no use talking to the authorities.
Blomkvist glanced at his laptop bag. He had brought along the Colt that he’d found
in her desk. He wasn’t sure why he had taken the gun, but he’d felt instinctively
that he must not leave it in her apartment. He knew that wasn’t much of a logical
argument.
As the train rolled across Årstabron he flipped open his mobile and called Bublanski.
“What do you want?” Bublanski said, obviously annoyed.
“To tie up loose ends,” Blomkvist said.
“Loose ends of what?”
“This whole mess. Do you want to know who murdered Svensson, Johansson, and
Bjurman?”
“If you have information I’d like to hear it.”
“The murderer’s name is Ronald Niedermann. That’s the giant who boxed with
Paolo Roberto. He’s a German citizen, thirty-five years old, and he works for a
scumbag named Alexander Zalachenko, also known as Zala.”
Bublanski said nothing for a long time, and then Blomkvist heard him sigh, turn
over a sheet of paper, and click his ballpoint.
“And you’re sure about this?”
“Yes.”
“OK. So where are Niedermann and this Zalachenko?”
“I don’t know yet. But as soon as I work it out I’ll let you know. In a little while
Erika Berger will deliver to you a police report from 1991. In it you’ll find all sorts of
information about Zalachenko and Salander.”
“Like what?”
“That Zalachenko is Lisbeth’s father, for example. That he’s a hit man who defected
from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”
“A Russian hit man?” Bublanski echoed.
“A faction within Säpo has been supporting him and concealing his criminal
dealings.”
Blomkvist heard Bublanski pull up a chair and sit down.
“I think it would be best if you came in and made a formal statement.”
“I don’t have time for that. I’m sorry.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m not in Stockholm at the moment. But I’ll send word as soon as I find
Zalachenko.”
“Blomkvist… You don’t have to prove anything. I have doubts about Salander’s guilt
too.”
“But I’m just a simple private investigator who doesn’t know the first thing about
police work.”
It was childish, he knew, but he disconnected without waiting for Bublanski’s reply.
Instead he called Annika Giannini.
“Hi, Sis.”
“Hi. Anything new?”
“I might be needing a good lawyer tomorrow.”
“What have you done?”
“Nothing too serious yet, but I might be arrested for obstructing a police
investigation. But that’s not why I called. You couldn’t represent me anyway.”
“Why not?”
“Because I want you to take on the defence of Lisbeth Salander, and you can’t look
after both of us.”
Blomkvist gave her a rapid rundown of the story. Giannini was ominously silent.
Finally she said, “And you have documentation of all this…”
“I do.”
“I’d have to think it over. Lisbeth really needs a criminal lawyer.”
“You’d be perfect.”
“Micke…”
“Listen, you were the one who was furious with me because I didn’t ask for help
when I needed it.”
When they’d finished their conversation, Blomkvist sat thinking. Then he picked up
his mobile and called Holger Palmgren. He didn’t have any particular reason for
doing so, but he wanted to tell him that he was following up one or two leads, and
that he hoped the whole story would be resolved within the next few hours.
The problem was that Salander had leads too.
• • •
Salander reached for an apple in her backpack without taking her eyes off the farm.
She lay stretched out at the edge of the woods with a floor mat from the Corolla as
a groundsheet. She had taken off her wig and changed into green tracksuit pants
with pockets, a thick sweater, and a midlength windbreaker with a thermal lining.
Gosseberga Farm lay about four hundred yards from the road. There were four
buildings. The main building was about a hundred and twenty yards in front of her,
an ordinary white-frame house on two floors, with a shed and a barn seventy yards
beyond the farmhouse. Through the barn door she could see the front of a white
car. She thought it was a Volvo, but it was too far away for her to be sure.
Between her and the main building there was a muddy field that extended to the
right about two hundred yards down towards a pond. The driveway cut through
the field and disappeared into a small stand of trees towards the road. Next to the
road there was another farmhouse that looked to be abandoned; the windows were
covered with plastic sheeting. Beyond the main building was a grove of trees that
served to block the view of the nearest neighbour, a clump of buildings almost six
hundred yards away. So the farm in front of her was relatively isolated.
She was close to Lake Anten in an area of rounded glacial moraines where fields
alternated with small communities and dense woodland. The road map gave no
detail, but she had followed the black Renault from Göteborg along the E20 and
turned west towards Sollebrunn in Alingsås district. After about forty minutes the
car made a sharp turn onto a forest road at a sign that said GOSSEBERGA. She had
driven on and parked behind a barn in a clump of trees about a hundred yards
north of the access road, then returned on foot.
She had never heard of Gosseberga, but as far as she could tell the name referred to
the house and barn in front of her. She had passed the mailbox on the road. Painted
on it was P.O. BOX 192—?. A. BODIN. The name meant nothing to her.
She had made a wide circuit of the buildings and finally selected her lookout spot.
She had the afternoon sun at her back. Since she’d gotten into position at around
3:30, only one thing had happened. At 4:00 the driver of the Renault came out of
the house. He exchanged some words in the doorway with someone she could not
see. Then he drove away and did not come back. Otherwise she had seen no
movement at the farm. She waited patiently and watched the building through a
pair of Minolta 8x binoculars.
• • •
Blomkvist drummed his fingers in annoyance on the tabletop in the restaurant car.
The X2000 had stopped in Katrineholm and had been standing there for almost an
hour. There was some malfunction in one of the carriages that had to be fixed. An
announcement apologized for the delay.
He sighed in frustration and ordered more coffee. At last, fifteen minutes later, the
train started up with a jerk. He looked at his watch. 8:00 p.m.
He should have taken a plane or rented a car.
He was now even more troubled by the feeling that he had started too late.
At around 6:00 p.m. someone had turned on a lamp in a room on the ground floor,
and shortly after that an oil lamp was lit. Salander glimpsed shadows in what she
imagined was the kitchen, to the right of the front door, but she could not make
out any faces.
Then the front door opened and the giant named Ronald Niedermann came out. He
wore dark trousers and a tight T-shirt that emphasized his muscles. She had been
right. She saw once more that Niedermann really was massive. But he was flesh
and blood like everyone else, no matter what Paolo Roberto and Miriam Wu had
been through. Niedermann walked around the house and went into the barn where
the car was parked. He came out with a small bag and went back inside the house.
After only a few minutes he appeared again. He was accompanied by a short, thin
older man who was using a crutch. It was too dark for Salander to make out his
features, but she felt an icy chill creep along the back of her neck.
Daaaddyyy, I’m heeeere…
She watched Zalachenko and Niedermann as they walked up the road. They
stopped at the shed, where Niedermann collected some firewood. Then they went
back to the house and closed the door.
Salander lay still for several minutes. Then she lowered her binoculars and
retreated until she was completely concealed among the trees. She opened her
backpack, took out a thermos, and poured some coffee. She put a lump of sugar in
her mouth and began to suck on it. She ate a cheese sandwich she had bought
earlier in the day on the way to Göteborg. As she ate she thought about the
situation.
After she had finished she took out Nieminen’s Polish P-83 Wanad. She ejected the
magazine and checked that nothing was blocking the bolt or the bore. She did a
blind fire. She had six rounds of 9 mm Makarov. That should be enough. She shoved
the magazine back in place and chambered a round. She put the safety catch on
and slipped the weapon into her right-hand jacket pocket.
Salander began her advance towards the house, moving in a circle through the
woods. She had gone about a hundred and fifty yards when suddenly she stopped
in mid-stride.
In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica, Pierre de Fermat had jotted the words I
have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too
narrow to contain.
The square had been converted to a cube, (x3 + y3 = z3), and mathematicians had
spent centuries looking for the answer to Fermat’s riddle. By the time Andrew Wiles
solved the puzzle in the 1990s, he had been at it for ten years using the world’s
most advanced computer programme.
And all of a sudden she understood. The answer was so disarmingly simple. A game
with numbers that lined up and then fell into place in a simple formula that was
most similar to a rebus.
Fermat had no computer, of course, and Wiles’ solution was based on mathematics
that had not been invented when Fermat formulated his theorem. Fermat would
never have been able to produce the proof that Wiles had presented. Fermat’s
solution was quite different.
She was so stunned that she had to sit down on a tree stump. She gazed straight
ahead as she checked the equation.
So that’s what he meant. No wonder mathematicians were tearing out their hair.
Then she giggled.
A philosopher would have had a better chance of solving this riddle.
She wished she could have known Fermat.
He was a cocky devil.
After a while she stood up and continued her approach through the trees. She kept
the barn between her and the house.
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