CHAPTER 22
Monday, 6.vi
Berger woke up at 6.00 on Monday morning. She had not
slept for more than an hour, but she felt strangely rested.
She supposed that it was a physical reaction of some sort.
For the first time in several months she put on her jogging
things and went for a furious and excruciatingly painful
sprint down to the steamboat wharf. But after a hundred
metres or so her heel hurt so much that she had to slow
down and go on at a more leisurely pace, relishing the pain
in her foot with each step she took.
She felt reborn. It was as though the Grim Reaper had
passed by her door and at the last moment changed his
mind and moved on to the next house. She could still not
take in how fortunate she was that Fredriksson had had
her pictures in his possession for four days and done
nothing with them. The scanning he had done indicated
that he had something planned, but he had simply not got
that he had something planned, but he had simply not got
around to whatever it was.
She decided to give Susanne Linder a very expensive
Christmas present this year. She would think of something
really special.
She left her husband asleep and at 7.30 drove to S.M.P.’s
office at Norrtull. She parked in the garage, took the lift to
the newsroom, and settled down in the glass cage. Before
she did anything else, she called someone from
maintenance.
“Peter Fredriksson has left the paper. He won’t be back,”
she said. “Please bring as many boxes as you need to
empty his desk of personal items and have them delivered
to his apartment this morning.”
She looked over towards the news desk. Holm had just
arrived. He met her gaze and nodded to her.
She nodded back.
Holm was a bloody-minded bastard, but after their
altercation a few weeks earlier he had stopped trying to
cause trouble. If he continued to show the same positive
attitude, he might possibly survive as news editor. Possibly.
She should, she felt, be able to turn things around.
At 8.45 she saw Borgsjö come out of the lift and disappear
up the internal staircase to his office on the floor above. I
have to talk to him today.
She got some coffee and spent a while on the morning
memo. It looked like it was going to be a slow news day.
The only item of interest was an agency report, to the
effect that Lisbeth Salander had been moved to the prison
in Stockholm the day before. She O.K.’d the story and
forwarded it to Holm.
At 8.59 Borgsjö called.
“Berger, come up to my office right away.” He hung up.
He was white in the face when Berger found him at his
desk. He stood up and slammed a thick wad of papers on
to his desk.
“What the hell is this?” he roared.
Berger’s heart sank like a stone. She only had to glance at
the cover to see what Borgsjö had found in the morning
post.
Fredriksson hadn’t managed to do anything with her
photographs. But he had posted Cortez’s article and
research to Borgsjö.
Calmly she sat down opposite him.
“That’s an article written by a reporter called Henry Cortez.
Millennium had planned to run it in last week’s issue.”
Borgsjö looked desperate.
“How the hell do you dare? I brought you into S.M.P. and
the first thing you do is to start digging up dirt. What kind of
a media whore are you?”
Berger’s eyes narrowed. She turned ice-cold. She had had
enough of the word “whore”.
“Do you really think anyone is going to care about this? Do
you think you can trap me with this crap? And why the hell
did you send it to me anonymously?”
“That’s not what happened, Magnus.”
“Then tell me what did happen.”
“The person who sent that article to you anonymously was
Fredriksson. He was fired from S.M.P. yesterday.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s a long story. But I’ve had a copy of the article for more
than two weeks, trying to work out a way of raising the
subject with you.”
“You’re behind this article?”
“No, I am not. Cortez researched and wrote the article
entirely off his own bat. I didn’t know anything about it.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“As soon as my old colleagues at Millennium saw how you
were implicated in the story, Blomkvist stopped its
publication. He called me and gave me a copy, out of
concern for my position. It was then stolen from me, and
now it’s ended up with you. Millennium wanted me to have
a chance to talk with you before they printed it. Which they
mean to do in the August issue.”
“I’ve never met a more unscrupulous media whore in my
whole life. It defies belief.”
“Now that you’ve read the story, perhaps you have also
considered the research behind it. Cortez has a cast-iron
story. You know that.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“If you’re still here when Millennium goes to press, that will
hurt S.M.P. I’ve worried myself sick and tried to find a way
out … but there isn’t one.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll have to go.”
“Don’t be absurd. I haven’t done anything illegal.”
“Magnus, don’t you understand the impact of this exposé? I
don’t want to have to call a board meeting. It would be too
embarrassing.”
“You’re not going to call anything at all. You’re finished at
S.M.P.”
“Wrong. Only the board can sack me. Presumably you’re
allowed to call them in for an extraordinary meeting. I would
suggest you do that for this afternoon.”
Borgsjö came round the desk and stood so close to Berger
that she could feel his breath.
“Berger, you have one chance to survive this. You have to
go to your damned colleagues at Millennium and get them
to kill this story. If you do a good job I might even forget
what you’ve done.”
Berger sighed.
“Magnus, you aren’t understanding how serious this is. I
have no influence whatsoever on what Millennium is going
to publish. This story is going to come out no matter what I
say. The only thing I care about is how it affects S.M.P.
That’s why you have to resign.”
Borgsjö put his hands on the back of her chair.
“Berger, your cronies at Millennium might change their
minds if they knew that you would be fired the instant they
leak this bullshit.”
He straightened up.
“I’ll be at a meeting in Norrköping today.” He looked at her,
furious and arrogant. “At Svea Construction.”
“I see.”
“When I’m back tomorrow you will report to me that this
matter has been taken care of. Understood?”
He put on his jacket. Berger watched him with her eyes half
closed.
“Maybe then you’ll survive at S.M.P. Now get out of my
office.”
She went back to the glass cage and sat quite still in her
chair for twenty minutes. Then she picked up the telephone
and asked Holm to come to her office. This time he was
there within a minute.
there within a minute.
“Sit down.”
Holm raised an eyebrow and sat down.
“What did I do wrong this time?” he said sarcastically.
“Anders, this is my last day at S.M.P. I’m resigning here
and now. I’m calling in the deputy chairman and as many of
the board as I can find for a meeting over lunch.”
He stared at her with undisguised shock.
“I’m going to recommend that you be made acting editor-in-chief.”
“What?”
“Are you O.K. with that?”
Holm leaned back in his chair and looked at her.
“I’ve never wanted to be editor-in-chief,” he said.
“I know that. But you’re tough enough to do the job. And
you’ll walk over corpses to be able to publish a good story.
I just wish you had more common sense.”
“So what happened?”
“I have a different style to you. You and I have always
argued about what angle to take, and we’ll never agree.”
“No,” he said. “We never will. But it’s possible that my style
is old-fashioned.”
“I don’t know if old-fashioned is the right word. You’re a
very good newspaperman, but you behave like a bastard.
That’s totally unnecessary. But what we were most at odds
about was that you claimed that as news editor you
couldn’t allow personal considerations to affect how the
news was assessed.”
Berger suddenly gave Holm a sly smile. She opened her
bag and took out her original text of the Borgsjö story.
“Let’s test your sense of news assessment. I have a story
here that came to us from a reporter at Millennium. This
morning I’m thinking that we should run this article as
today’s top story.” She tossed the folder into Holm’s lap.
“You’re the news editor. I’d be interested to hear whether
you share my assessment.”
Holm opened the folder and began to read. Even the
introduction made his eyes widen. He sat up straight in his
chair and stared at Berger. Then he lowered his eyes and
read through the article to the end. He studied the source
material for ten more minutes before he slowly put the
folder aside.
“This is going to cause one hell of an uproar.”
“I know. That’s why I’m leaving. Millennium was planning to
run the story in their July issue, but Mikael Blomkvist
stopped publication. He gave me the article so that I could
talk with Borgsjö before they run it.”
“And?”
“Borgsjö ordered me to suppress it.”
“I see. So you’re planning to run it in S.M.P. out of spite?”
“Not out of spite, no. There’s no other way. If S.M.P. runs
the story, we have a chance of getting out of this mess with
our honour intact. Borgsjö has no choice but to go. But it
also means that I can’t stay here any longer.”
Holm sat in silence for two minutes.
“Damn it, Berger … I didn’t think you were that tough. I
never thought I’d ever say this, but if you’re that thick-skinned, I’m actually sorry you’re leaving.”
“You could stop publication, but if both you and I O.K. it …
Do you think you’ll run the story?”
“Too right we’ll run it. It would leak anyway.”
“Exactly.”
Holm got up and stood uncertainly by her desk.
“Get to work,” said Berger.
After Holm left her office she waited five minutes before she
picked up the telephone and rang Eriksson.
“Hello, Malin. Is Henry there?”
“Yes, he’s at his desk.”
“Could you call him into your office and put on the
speakerphone? We have to have a conference.”
Cortez was there within fifteen seconds.
“What’s up?”
“Henry, I did something immoral today.”
“Oh, you did?”
“I gave your story about Vitavara to the news editor here at
S.M.P.”
“You what?”
“I told him to run the story in S.M.P. tomorrow. Your byline.
And you’ll be paid, of course. In fact, you can name your
price.”
“Erika … what the hell is going on?”
She gave him a brisk summary of what had happened
during the last weeks, and how Fredriksson had almost
destroyed her.
“Jesus Christ,” Cortez said.
“I know that this is your story, Henry. But equally I have no
choice. Can you agree to this?”
Cortez was silent for a long while.
“Thanks for asking.” he said. “It’s O.K. to run the story with
my byline. If it’s O.K. with Malin, I should say.”
“It’s O.K. with me,” Eriksson said.
“Thank you both,” Berger said. “Can you tell Mikael? I don’t
suppose he’s in yet.”
“I’ll talk to Mikael,” Eriksson said. “But Erika, does this
mean that you’re out of work from today?”
Berger laughed. “I’ve decided to take the rest of the year
off. Believe me, a few weeks at S.M.P. was enough.”
“I don’t think you ought to start thinking in terms of a
holiday yet,” Eriksson said.
“Why not?”
“Could you come here this afternoon?”
“What for?”
“I need help. If you want to come back to being editor-in-chief here, you could start tomorrow morning.”
“Malin, you’re the editor-in-chief. Anything else is out of the
question.”
“Then you could start as assistant editor,” Eriksson
laughed.
“Are you serious?”
“Oh, Erika, I miss you so much that I’m ready to die. One
reason I took the job here was so that I’d have a chance to
work with you. And now you’re somewhere else.”
Berger said nothing for a minute. She had not even
thought about the possibility of making a comeback at
Millennium.
“Do you think I’d really be welcome?” she said hesitantly.
“What do you think? I reckon we’d begin with a huge
celebration which I would arrange myself. And you’d be
back just in time for us to publish you-know-what.”
Berger checked the clock on her desk. 10.55. In a couple
of hours her whole world had been turned upside down.
She realized what a longing she had to walk up the stairs at
Millennium again.
“I have a few things to take care of here over the next few
hours. Is it O.K. if I pop in at around 4.00?”
Linder looked Armansky directly in the eye as she told him
exactly what had happened during the night. The only thing
she left out was her sudden intuition that the hacking of
Fredriksson’s computer had something to do with Salander.
She kept that to herself for two reasons. First, she thought
it sounded too implausible. Second, she knew that
Armansky was somehow up to his neck in the Salander
affair along with Blomkvist.
Armansky listened intently. When Linder finished her
account, he said: “Beckman called about an hour ago.”
“Oh?”
“He and Berger are coming in later this week to sign a
contract. He wants to thank us for what Milton has done
and above all for what you have done.”
“I see. It’s nice to have a satisfied client.”
“He also wants to order a safe for the house. We’ll install it
and finish up the alarm package before this weekend.”
“That’s good.”
“He says he wants us to invoice him for your work over the
weekend. That’ll make it quite a sizable bill we’ll be sending
them.” Armansky sighed. “Susanne, you do know that
Fredriksson could go to the police and get you into very
deep water on a number of counts.”
She nodded.
“Mind you, he’d end up in prison so fast it would make his
head spin, but he might think it was worth it.”
“I doubt he has the balls to go to the police.”
“You may be right, but what you did far exceeded
instructions.”
“I know.”
“So how do you think I should react?”
“Only you can decide that.” “How did you think I would to
react?”
“What I think has nothing to do with it. You could always
sack me.”
“Hardly. I can’t afford to lose a professional of your calibre.”
“Thanks.”
“But if you do anything like this again, I’m going to get very
angry.”
Linder nodded.
“What did you do with the hard drive?”
“It’s destroyed. I put it in a vice this morning and crushed it.
”
“Then we can forget about all this.”
Berger spent the rest of the morning calling the board
members of S.M.P. She reached the deputy chairman at
his summer house near Vaxholm and persuaded him to
drive to the city as quickly as he could. A rather makeshift
board assembled over lunch. Berger began by explaining
how the Cortez folder had come to her, and what
consequences it had already had.
When she finished it was proposed, as she had
anticipated, that they try to find another solution. Berger
told them that S.M.P. was going to run the story the next
day. She also told them that this would be her last day of
work and that her decision was final.
She got the board to approve two decisions and enter
them in the minutes. Magnus Borgsjö would be asked to
vacate his position as chairman, effective immediately, and
Anders Holm would be appointed acting editor-in-chief.
Then she excused herself and left the board members to
discuss the situation among themselves.
At 2.00 she went down to the personnel department and
had a contract drawn up. Then she went to speak to
Sebastian Strandlund, the culture editor, and the reporter
Eva Karlsson.
“As far as I can tell, you consider Eva to be a talented
reporter.”
“That’s true,” said Strandlund.
“And in your budget requests over the past two years
you’ve asked that your staff be increased by at least two.”
“Correct.”
“Eva, in view of the email to which you were subjected,
there might be ugly rumours if I were to hire you full-time.
But are you still interested?”
“Of course.”
“In that case my last act here at S.M.P. will be to sign this
employment contract.”
“Your last act?”
“It’s a long story. I’m leaving today. Could you two be so
kind as to keep quiet about it for an hour or so?”
“What …”
“There’ll be a memo coming around soon.”
Berger signed the contract and pushed it across the desk
towards Karlsson.
“Good luck,” she said, smiling.
“The older man who participated in the meeting with
Ekström on Saturday is Georg Nyström, a police
superintendent,” Figuerola said as she put the surveillance
photographs from Modig’s mobile on Edklinth’s desk.
“Superintendent,” Edklinth muttered.
“Stefan identified him last night. He went to the apartment
on Artillerigatan.”
“What do we know about him?”
“He comes from the regular police and has worked for
S.I.S. since 1983. Since 1996 he’s been serving as an
investigator with his own area of responsibility. He does
internal checks and examines cases that S.I.S. has
completed.”
“O.K.”
“Since Saturday morning six persons of interest have been
to the building. Besides Sandberg and Nyström, Clinton is
definitely operating from there. This morning he was taken
by ambulance to have dialysis.”
“Who are the other three?”
“A man named Otto Hallberg. He was in S.I.S. in the ’80s
but he’s actually connected to the Defence General Staff.
He works for the navy and the military intelligence service.”
“I see. Why am I not surprised?”
Figuerola laid down one more photograph. “This man we
haven’t identified yet. He went to lunch with Hallberg. We’ll
have to see if we can get a better picture when he goes
home tonight. But the most interesting one is this man.”
She laid another photograph on the desk.
“I recognize him,” Edklinth said.
“His name is Wadensjöö.”
“Precisely. He worked on the terrorist detail around fifteen
years ago. A desk man. He was one of the candidates for
the post of top boss here at the Firm. I don’t know what
became of him.”
“He resigned in 1991. Guess who he had lunch with an
hour or so ago.”
She put her last photograph on the desk.
“Chief of Secretariat Shenke and Chief of Budget Gustav
Atterbom. I want to have surveillance on these gentlemen
around the clock. I want to know exactly who they meet.”
“That’s not practical,” Edklinth said. “I have only four men
available.”
Edklinth pinched his lower lip as he thought. Then he
looked up at Figuerola.
“We need more people,” he said. “Do you think you could
reach Inspector Bublanski discreetly and ask him if he
might like to have dinner with me today? Around 7.00, say?
might like to have dinner with me today? Around 7.00, say?
”
Edklinth then reached for his telephone and dialled a
number from memory.
“Hello, Armansky. It’s Edklinth. Might I reciprocate for that
wonderful dinner? No, I insist. Shall we say 7.00?”
Salander had spent the night in Kronoberg prison in a two-by-four-metre cell. The furnishings were pretty basic, but
she had fallen asleep within minutes of the key being
turned in the lock. Early on Monday morning she was up
and obediently doing the stretching exercises prescribed
for her by the physio at Sahlgrenska. Breakfast was then
brought to her, and she sat on her cot and stared into
space.
At 9.30 she was led to an interrogation cell at the end of
the corridor. The guard was a short, bald, old man with a
round face and hornrimmed glasses. He was polite and
cheerful.
Giannini greeted her affectionately. Salander ignored
Faste. She was meeting Prosecutor Ekström for the first
time, and she spent the next half hour sitting on a chair
staring stonily at a spot on the wall just above Ekström’s
head. She said nothing and she did not move a muscle.
At 10.00 Ekström broke off the fruitless interrogation. He
was annoyed not to be able to get the slightest response
out of her. For the first time he felt uncertain as he
observed the thin, doll-like young woman. How was it
possible that she could have beaten up those two thugs
Lundin and Nieminen in Stallarholmen? Would the court
really believe that story, even if he did have convincing
evidence?
Salander was brought a simple lunch at noon and spent
the next hour solving equations in her head. She focused
on an area of spherical astronomy from a book she had
read two years earlier.
At 2.30 she was led back to the interrogation cell. This time
her guard was a young woman. Salander sat on a chair in
the empty cell and pondered a particularly intricate
equation.
After ten minutes the door opened.
“Hello, Lisbeth.” A friendly tone. It was Teleborian.
He smiled at her, and she froze. The components of the
equation she had constructed in the air before her came
tumbling to the ground. She could hear the numbers and
mathematical symbols bouncing and clattering as if they
had physical form.
Teleborian stood still for a minute and looked at her before
he sat down on the other side of the table. She continued
to stare at the same spot on the wall.
After a while she met his eyes.
“I’m sorry that you’ve ended up in this situation,” Teleborian
said. “I’m going to try to help you in every way I can. I hope
we can establish some level of mutual trust.”
Salander examined every inch of him. The dishevelled hair.
The beard. The little gap between his front teeth. The thin
lips. The brand-new brown jacket. The shirt open at the
neck. She listened to his smooth and treacherously friendly
voice.
“I also hope that I can be of more help to you than the last
time we met.”
He placed a small notebook and pen on the table.
Salander lowered her eyes and looked at the pen. It was a
pointed, silver-coloured tube.
Risk assessment.
She suppressed an impulse to reach out and grab the pen.
Her eyes sought the little finger of his left hand. She saw a
faint white mark where fifteen years earlier she had sunk in
her teeth and locked her jaws so hard that she almost bit
his finger off. It had taken three guards to hold her down
and prise open her jaws.
I was a scared little girl barely into my teens then. Now I’m
a grown woman. I can kill you whenever I want.
Again she fixed her eyes on the spot on the wall, and
gathered up the scattered numbers and symbols and
began to reassemble the equation.
Teleborian studied Salander with a neutral expression. He
had not become an internationally respected psychiatrist
for nothing. He had a gift for reading emotions and moods.
He could sense a cold shadow passing through the room,
and interpreted this as a sign that the patient felt fear and
shame beneath her imperturbable exterior. He assumed
that she was reacting to his presence, and was pleased
that her attitude towards him had not changed over the
years. She’s going to hang herself in the district court.
Berger’s final act at S.M.P. was to write a memo to the
staff. To begin with her mood was angry, and she filled two
pages explaining why she was resigning, including her
opinion of various colleagues. Then she deleted the whole
text and started again in a calmer tone.
She did not refer to Fredriksson. If she had done, all
interest would have focused on him, and her real reasons
interest would have focused on him, and her real reasons
would be drowned out by the sensation a case of sexual
harassment would inevitably cause.
She gave two reasons. The principal one was that she had
met implacable resistance from management to her
proposal that managers and owners should reduce their
salaries and bonuses. Which meant that she would have
had to start her tenure at S.M.P. with damaging cutbacks in
staff. This was not only a breach of the promise she had
been given when she accepted the job, but it would
undercut her every attempt to bring about long-term
change in order to strengthen the newspaper.
The second reason she gave was the revelation about
Borgsjö. She wrote that she had been instructed to cover
up the story, and this flew in the face of all she believed to
be her job. It meant that she had no choice but to resign
her position as editor. She concluded by saying that
S.M.P.’s dire situation was not a personnel problem, but a
management problem.
She read through the memo, corrected the typos, and
emailed it to all the paper’s employees. She sent a copy to
Pressens Tidning, a media journal, and also to the trade
magazine Journalisten. Then she packed away her laptop
and went to see Holm at his desk.
“Goodbye,” she said.
“Goodbye, Berger. It was hellish working with you.”
They smiled at each other.
“One last thing,” she said.
“Tell me?”
“Frisk has been working on a story I commissioned.”
“Right, and nobody has any idea what it’s about.”
“Give him some support. He’s come a long way, and I’ll be
staying in touch with him. Let him finish the job. I guarantee
you’ll be pleased with the result.”
He looked wary. Then he nodded.
They did not shake hands. She left her card key on his
desk and took the lift down to the garage. She parked her
B.M.W. near the Millennium offices at a little after 4.00.
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