CHAPTER 8
SUNDAY, 1.v – MONDAY, 2.v
Berger took a deep breath as the lift door opened and she
walked into the editorial offices of Svenska Morgon-Posten.
It was 10.15 in the morning. She was dressed for the office
in black trousers, a red jumper and a dark jacket. It was
glorious May 1 weather, and on her way through the city
she noticed that the workers’ groups had begun to gather.
It dawned on her that she had not been part of such a
parade in more than twenty years.
For a moment she stood, alone and invisible, next to the lift
doors. First day on the job. She could see a large part of
the editorial office with the news desk in the centre. She
saw the glass doors of the editor-in-chief’s office, which
was now hers.
She was not at all sure right now that she was the person
to lead the sprawling organization that comprised S.M.P. It
was a gigantic step up from Millennium with a staff of five to
a daily newspaper with eighty reporters and another ninety
people in administration, with I.T. personnel, layout artists,
photographers, advertising reps, and all else it takes to
publish a newspaper. Add to that a publishing house, a
production company and a management company. More
than 230 people.
As she stood there she asked herself whether the whole
thing was not a hideous mistake.
Then the older of the two receptionists noticed who had
just come into the office. She got up and came out from
behind the counter and extended her hand.
“Fru Berger, welcome to S.M.P.”
“Call me Erika. Hello.”
“Beatrice. Welcome. Shall I show you where to find Editor-in-Chief Morander? I should say ‘outgoing editor-in-chief’?”
“Thank you, I see him sitting in the glass cage over there,”
said Berger with a smile. “I can find my way, but thanks for
the offer.”
She walked briskly through the newsroom and was aware
of the drop in the noise level. She felt everyone’s eyes
upon her. She stopped at the half-empty news desk and
gave a friendly nod.
“We’ll introduce ourselves properly in a while,” she said,
and then walked over to knock on the door of the glass
cubicle.
The departing editor-in-chief, Håkan Morander, had spent
twelve years in the glass cage. Just like Berger, he had
been head-hunted from outside the company – so he had
been head-hunted from outside the company – so he had
once taken that very same first walk to his office. He looked
up at her, puzzled, and then stood up.
“Hello, Erika,” he said. “I thought you were starting Monday.
”
“I couldn’t stand sitting at home one more day. So here I
am.”
Morander held out his hand. “Welcome. I can’t tell you how
glad I am that you’re taking over.”
“How are you feeling?” Berger said.
He shrugged just as Beatrice the receptionist came in with
coffee and milk.
“It feels as though I’m already operating at half speed.
Actually I don’t want to talk about it. You walk around
feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and
suddenly there isn’t much time left. But one thing is for sure
– I don’t mean to spend the rest of it in this glass cage.”
He rubbed his chest. He had heart and artery problems,
which was the reason for his going and why Berger was to
start several months earlier than originally announced.
Berger turned and looked out over the landscape of the
newsroom. She saw a reporter and a photographer
newsroom. She saw a reporter and a photographer
heading for the lift, perhaps on their way to cover the May
Day parade.
“Håkan … if I’m being a nuisance or if you’re busy today, I’ll
come back tomorrow or the day after.”
“Today’s task is to write an editorial on the demonstrations.
I could do it in my sleep. If the pinkos want to start a war
with Denmark, then I have to explain why they’re wrong. If
the pinkos want to avoid a war with Denmark, I have to
explain why they’re wrong.”
“Denmark?”
“Correct. The message on May Day has to touch on the
immigrant integration question. The pinkos, of course, no
matter what they say, are wrong.”
He burst out laughing.
“Always so cynical?”
“Welcome to S.M.P.”
Erika had never had an opinion about Morander. He was
an anonymous power figure among the elite of editors-in-chief. In his editorials he came across as boring and
conservative. Expert in complaining about taxes, and a
typical libertarian when it came to freedom of the press. But
typical libertarian when it came to freedom of the press. But
she had never met him in person.
“Do you have time to tell me about the job?”
“I’m gone at the end of June. We’ll work side by side for two
months. You’ll discover positive things and negative things.
I’m a cynic, so mostly I see the negative things.”
He got up and stood next to her to look through the glass
at the newsroom.
“You’ll discover that – it comes with the job – you’re going
to have a number of adversaries out there – daily editors
and veterans among the editors who have created their
own little empires. They have their own club that you can’t
join. They’ll try to stretch the boundaries, to push through
their own headlines and angles. You’ll have to fight hard to
hold your own.”
Berger nodded.
“Your night editors are Billinger and Karlsson … they’re a
whole chapter unto themselves. They hate each other and,
importantly, they don’t work the same shift, but they both
act as if they’re publishers and editors-in-chief. Then
there’s Anders Holm, the news editor – you’ll be working
with him a lot. You’ll have your share of clashes with him. In
point of fact, he’s the one who gets S.M.P. out every day.
Some of the reporters are prize primadonnas, and some of
Some of the reporters are prize primadonnas, and some of
them should really be put out to grass.”
“Have you got any good colleagues?”
Morander laughed again.
“Oh yes, but you’re going to have to decide for yourself
which ones you can get along with. Some of the reporters
out there are seriously good.”
“How about management?”
“Magnus Borgsjö is chairman of the board. He was the one
who recruited you. He’s charming. A bit old school and yet
at the same time a bit of a reformer, but he’s above all the
one who makes the decisions. Some of the board
members, including several from the family which owns the
paper, mostly seem to sit and kill time, while others flutter
around, professional board-member types.”
“You don’t seem to be exactly enamoured of your board.”
“There’s a division of labour. We put out the paper. They
take care of the finances. They’re not supposed to
interfere with the content, but situations do crop up. To be
honest, Erika, between the two of us, this is going to be
tough.”
“Why’s that?”
“Circulation has dropped by nearly 150,000 copies since
the glory days of the ’60s, and there may soon come a time
when S.M.P. is no longer profitable. We’ve reorganized, cut
more than 180 jobs since 1980. We went over to tabloid
format – which we should have done twenty years sooner.
S.M.P. is still one of the big papers, but it wouldn’t take
much for us to be regarded as a second-class paper. If it
hasn’t already happened.”
“Why did they pick me then?” Berger said.
“Because the median age of our readers is fifty-plus, and
the growth in readers in their twenties is almost zero. The
paper has to be rejuvenated. And the reasoning among the
board was to bring in the most improbable editor-in-chief
they could think of.”
“A woman?”
“Not just any woman. The woman who crushed
Wennerström’s empire, who is considered the queen of
investigative journalism, and who has a reputation for
being the toughest. Picture it. It’s irresistible. If you can’t
rejuvenate this paper, nobody can. S.M.P. isn’t just hiring
Erika Berger, we’re hiring the whole mystique that goes with
your name.”
When Blomkvist left Café Copacabana next to the Kvarter
cinema at Hornstull, it was just past 2.00 p.m. He put on his
dark glasses and turned up Bergsundsstrand on his way to
the tunnelbana. He noticed the grey Volvo at once, parked
at the corner. He passed it without slowing down. Same
registration, and the car was empty.
It was the seventh time he had seen the same car in four
days. He had no idea how long the car had been in his
neighbourhood. It was pure chance that he had noticed it
at all. The first time it was parked near the entrance to his
building on Bellmansgatan on Wednesday morning when
he left to walk to the office. He happened to read the
registration number, which began with KAB, and he paid
attention because those were the initials of Zalachenko’s
holding company, Karl Axel Bodin Inc. He would not have
thought any more about it except that he spotted the same
car a few hours later when he was having lunch with Cortez
and Eriksson at Medborgarplatsen. That time the Volvo
was parked on a side street near the Millennium offices.
He wondered whether he was becoming paranoid, but
when he visited Palmgren the same afternoon at the
rehabilitation home in Ersta, the car was in the visitors’ car
park. That could not have been chance. Blomkvist began
to keep an eye on everything around him. And when he
saw the car again the next morning he was not surprised.
Not once had he seen its driver.
A call to the national vehicle register revealed that the car
belonged to a Göran Mårtensson of Vittangigaten in
Vällingby. An hour’s research turned up the information
that Mårtensson held the title of business consultant and
owned a private company whose address was a P.O. box
on Fleminggatan in Kungsholmen. Mårtensson’s C.V. was
an interesting one. In 1983, at eighteen, he had done his
military service with the coast guard, and then enrolled in
the army. By 1989 he had advanced to lieutenant, and
then he switched to study at the police academy in Solna.
Between 1991 and 1996 he worked for the Stockholm
police. In 1997 he was no longer on the official roster of the
external service, and in 1999 he had registered his own
company.
So – Säpo.
An industrious investigative journalist could get paranoid
on less than this. Blomkvist concluded that he was under
surveillance, but it was being carried out so clumsily that he
could hardly have helped but notice.
Or was it clumsy? The only reason he first noticed the car
was the registration number, which just happened to mean
something to him. But for the KAB, he would not have given
the car a second glance.
On Friday KAB was conspicuous by its absence. Blomkvist
could not be absolutely sure, but he thought he had been
tailed by a red Audi that day. He had not managed to catch
the registration number. On Friday the Volvo was back.
Exactly twenty seconds after Blomkvist left Café
Copacabana, Malm raised his Nikon in the shadows of
Café Rosso’s awning across the street and took a series of
twelve photographs of the two men who followed Blomkvist
out of the café and past the Kvarter cinema.
One of the men looked to be in his late thirties or early
forties and had blond hair. The other seemed a bit older,
with thinning reddish-blond hair and sunglasses. Both were
dressed in jeans and leather jackets.
They parted company at the grey Volvo. The older man got
in, and the younger one followed Blomkvist towards
Hornstull tunnelbana station.
Malm lowered the camera. Blomkvist had given him no
good reason for insisting that he patrol the neighbourhood
near the Copacabana on Sunday afternoon looking for a
grey Volvo with a registration beginning KAB. Blomkvist told
him to position himself where he could photograph whoever
got into the car, probably just after 3.00. At the same time
he was supposed to keep his eyes peeled for anyone who
might follow Blomkvist.
It sounded like the prelude to a typical Blomkvist
adventure. Malm was never quite sure whether Blomkvist
was paranoid by nature or if he had paranormal gifts. Since
the events in Gosseberga his colleague had certainly
become withdrawn and hard to communicate with. Nothing
unusual about this, though. But when Blomkvist was
working on a complicated story – Malm had observed the
same obsessive and secretive behaviour in the weeks
before the Wennerström story broke – it became more
pronounced.
On the other hand, Malm could see for himself that
Blomkvist was indeed being tailed. He wondered vaguely
what new nightmare was in the offing. Whatever it was, it
would soak up all of Millennium’s time, energy and
resources. Malm did not think it was a great idea for
Blomkvist to set off on some wild scheme just when the
magazine’s editor-in-chief had deserted to the Big Daily,
and now Millennium’s laboriously reconstructed stability
was suddenly hanging once again in the balance.
But Malm had not participated in any parade – apart from
Gay Pride – in at least ten years. He had nothing better to
do on this May Day Sunday than humour his wayward
publisher. He sauntered after the man tailing Blomkvist
even though he had not been instructed to do so, but he
lost sight him on Långholmsgatan.
One of the first things Blomkvist did when he realized that
his mobile was bugged was to send Cortez out to buy some
used handsets. Cortez bought a job lot of Ericsson T10s
for a song. Blomkvist then opened some anonymous cash-card accounts on Comviq and distributed the mobiles to
Eriksson, Cortez, Giannini, Malm and Armansky, also
keeping one for himself. They were to be used only for
conversations that absolutely must not be overheard. Day-to-day stuff they could and should do on their own mobiles.
Which meant that they all had to carry two mobiles with
them.
Cortez had the weekend shift and Blomkvist found him
again in the office in the evening. Since the murder of
Zalachenko, Blomkvist had devised a 24/7 roster, so that
Millennium’s office was always staffed and someone slept
there every night. The roster included himself, Cortez,
Eriksson and Malm. Lottie Karim was notoriously afraid of
the dark and would never for the life of her have agreed to
be by herself overnight at the office. Nilsson was not afraid
of the dark, but she worked so furiously on her projects
that she was encouraged to go home when the day was
done. Magnusson was getting on in years and as
advertising manager had nothing to do with the editorial
side. He was also about to go on holiday.
“Anything new?”
“Nothing special,” Cortez said. “Today is all about May 1,
naturally enough.”
“I’m going to be here for a couple of hours,” Blomkvist told
him. “Take a break and come back around 9.00.”
After Cortez left, Blomkvist got out his anonymous mobile
and called Daniel Olsson, a freelance journalist in
Göteborg. Over the years Millennium had published
several of his articles and Blomkvist had great faith in his
ability to gather background material.
“Hi, Daniel. Mikael Blomkvist here. Can you talk?”
“Sure.”
“I need someone for a research job. You can bill us for five
days, and you don’t have to produce an article at the end
of it. Well, you can write an article on the subject if you
want and we’ll publish it, but it’s the research we’re after.”
“Fine. Tell me.”
“It’s sensitive. You can’t discuss this with anyone except
me, and you can communicate with me only via hotmail.
You must not even mention that you’re doing research for
Millennium.”
“This sounds fun. What are you looking for?”
“I want you to do a workplace report on Sahlgrenska
hospital. We’re calling the report ‘E.R.’, and it’s to look at
the differences between reality and the T. V. series. I want
you to go to the hospital and observe the work in the
emergency ward and the intensive care unit for a couple of
days. Talk with doctors, nurses and cleaners – everybody
who works there in fact. What are their working conditions
like? What do they actually do? That sort of stuff.
Photographs too, of course.”
“Intensive care?” Olsson said.
“Exactly. I want you to focus on the follow-up care given to
severely injured patients in corridor 11C. I want to know the
whole layout of the corridor, who works there, what they
look like, and what sort of background they have.”
“Unless I’m mistaken, a certain Lisbeth Salander is a
patient on 11C.”
Olsson was not born yesterday.
“How interesting,” Blomkvist said. “Find out which room
she’s in, who’s in the neighbouring rooms, and what the
routines are in that section.”
“I have a feeling that this story is going to be about
something altogether different,” Olsson said.
“As I said … all I want is the research you come up with.”
They exchanged hotmail addresses.
Salander was lying on her back on the floor when Nurse
Marianne came in.
“Hmm,” she said, thereby indicating her doubts about the
wisdom of this style of conduct in the intensive care unit.
But it was, she accepted, her patient’s only exercise space.
Salander was sweating. She had spent thirty minutes trying
to do arm lifts, stretches and sit-ups on the
recommendation of her physiotherapist. She had a long list
of the movements she was to perform each day to
strengthen the muscles in her shoulder and hip in the wake
of her operation three weeks earlier. She was breathing
hard and felt wretchedly out of shape. She tired easily and
her left shoulder was tight and hurt at the very least effort.
But she was on the path to recovery. The headaches that
had tormented her after surgery had subsided and came
back only sporadically.
She realized that she was sufficiently recovered now that
she could have walked out of the hospital, or at any rate
hobbled out, if that had been possible, but it was not. First
of all, the doctors had not yet declared her fit, and second,
the door to her room was always locked and guarded by a
fucking hit-man from Securitas, who sat on his chair in the
corridor.
She was healthy enough to be moved to a normal
rehabilitation ward, but after going back and forth about
this, the police and hospital administration had agreed that
Salander should remain in room eighteen for the time
being. The room was easier to guard, there was round-the-clock staff close by, and the room was at the end of an L-shaped corridor. And in corridor 11C the staff were
security-conscious after the killing of Zalachenko; they
were familiar with her situation. Better not to move her to a
new ward with new routines.
Her stay at Sahlgrenska was in any case going to come to
an end in a few more weeks. As soon as the doctors
discharged her, she would be transferred to Kronoberg
prison in Stockholm to await trial. And the person who
would decide when it was time for that was Dr Jonasson.
It was ten days after the shooting in Gosseberga before Dr
Jonasson gave permission for the police to conduct their
first real interview, which Giannini viewed as being to
Salander’s advantage. Unfortunately Dr Jonasson had
made it difficult even for Giannini to have access to her
client, and that was annoying.
After the tumult of Zalachenko’s murder and Gullberg’s
attempted suicide, he had done an evaluation of
attempted suicide, he had done an evaluation of
Salander’s condition. He took into account that Salander
must be under a great deal of stress for having been
suspected of three murders plus a damn-near fatal assault
on her late father. Jonasson had no idea whether she was
guilty or innocent, and as a doctor he was not the least bit
interested in the answer to that question. He simply
concluded that Salander was suffering from stress, that
she had been shot three times, and that one bullet had
entered her brain and almost killed her. She had a fever
that would not abate, and she had severe headaches.
He had played it safe. Murder suspect or not, she was his
patient, and his job was to make sure she got well. So he
filled out a “no visitors” form that had no connection
whatsoever to the one that was set in place by the
prosecutor. He prescribed various medications and
complete bedrest.
But Jonasson also realized that isolation was an inhumane
way of punishing people; in fact it bordered on torture. No-one felt good when they were separated from all their
friends, so he decided that Salander’s lawyer should serve
as a proxy friend. He had a serious talk with Giannini and
explained that she could have access to Salander for one
hour a day. During this hour she could talk with her or just
sit quietly and keep her company, but their conversations
should not deal with Salander’s problems or impending
legal battles.
legal battles.
“Lisbeth Salander was shot in the head and was very
seriously injured,” he explained. “I think she’s out of
danger, but there is always a risk of bleeding or some other
complication. She needs to rest and she has to have time
to heal. Only when that has happened can she begin to
confront her legal problems.”
Giannini understood Dr Jonasson’s reasoning. She had
some general conversations with Salander and hinted at
the outline of the strategy that she and Blomkvist had
planned, but Salander was simply so drugged and
exhausted that she would fall asleep while Giannini was
speaking.
Armansky studied Malm’s photographs of the men who had
followed Blomkvist from the Copacabana. They were in
sharp focus.
“No,” he said. “Never seen them before.”
Blomkvist nodded. They were in Armansky’s office on
Monday morning. Blomkvist had come into the building via
the garage.
“The older one is Göran Mårtensson, who owns the Volvo.
He followed me like a guilty conscience for at least a week,
but it could have been longer.”
“And you reckon that he’s Säpo.”
Blomkvist referred to Mårtensson’s C.V. Armansky
hesitated.
You could take it for granted that the Security Police
invariably made fools of themselves. That was the natural
order of things, not for Säpo alone but probably for
intelligence services all over the world. The French secret
police had sent frogmen to New Zealand to blow up the
Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, for God’s sake. That
had to be the most idiotic intelligence operation in the
history of the world. With the possible exception of
President Nixon’s lunatic break-in at Watergate. With such
cretinous leadership it was no wonder that scandals
occurred. Their successes were never reported. But the
media jumped all over the Security Police whenever
anything improper or foolish came to light, and with all the
wisdom of hindsight.
On the one hand, the media regarded Säpo as an
excellent news source, and almost any political blunder
gave rise to headlines: “Säpo suspects that …” A Säpo
statement carried a lot of weight in a headline.
On the other hand, politicians of various affiliations, along
with the media, were particularly diligent in condemning
exposed Säpo agents if they had spied on Swedish
citizens. Armansky found this entirely contradictory. He did
not have anything against the existence of Säpo. Someone
had to take responsibility for seeing to it that national-Bolshevist crackpots – who had read too much Bakunin or
whoever the hell these neo-Nazis read – did not patch
together a bomb made of fertilizer and oil and park it in a
van outside Rosenbad. Säpo was necessary, and
Armansky did not think a little discreet surveillance was
such a bad thing, so long as its objective was to safeguard
the security of the nation.
The problem, of course, was that an organization assigned
to spy on citizens must remain under strict public scrutiny.
There had to be a high level of constitutional oversight. But
it was almost impossible for Members of Parliament to have
oversight of Säpo, even when the Prime Minister appointed
a special investigator who, on paper at least, was
supposed to have access to everything. Armansky had
Blomkvist’s copy of Lidbom’s book An Assignment, and he
was reading it with gathering astonishment. If this were the
United States a dozen or so senior Säpo hands would have
been arrested for obstruction of justice and forced to
appear before a public committee in Congress. In Sweden
apparently they were untouchable.
The Salander case demonstrated that something was out
of joint inside the organization. But when Blomkvist came
over to give him a secure mobile, Armansky’s first thought
over to give him a secure mobile, Armansky’s first thought
was that the man was paranoid. It was only when he heard
the details and studied Malm’s photographs that he
reluctantly admitted that Blomkvist had good reason to be
suspicious. It did not bode well, but rather indicated that
the conspiracy that had tried to eliminate Salander fifteen
years earlier was not a thing of the past.
There were simply too many incidents for this to be
coincidence. Never mind that Zalachenko had supposedly
been murdered by a nutter. It had happened at the same
time that both Blomkvist and Giannini were robbed of the
document that was the cornerstone in the burden of proof.
That was a shattering misfortune. And then the key
witness, Gunnar Björck, had gone and hanged himself.
“Are we agreed that I pass this on to my contact?”
Armansky said, gathering up Blomkvist’s documentation.
“And this is a person that you say you can trust?”
“An individual of the highest moral standing.”
“Inside Säpo?” Blomkvist said with undisguised scepticism.
“We have to be of one mind. Both Holger and I have
accepted your plan and are co-operating with you. But we
can’t clear this matter up all by ourselves. We have to find
allies within the bureaucracy if this is not going to end in
calamity.”
calamity.”
“O.K.” Blomkvist nodded reluctantly. “I’ve never had to give
out information on a story before it’s published.”
“But in this case you already have. You’ve told me, your
sister, and Holger.”
“True enough.”
“And you did it because even you recognize that this is far
more than just a scoop in your magazine. For once you’re
not an objective reporter, but a participant in unfolding
events. And as such you need help. You’re not going to win
on your own.”
Blomkvist gave in. He had not, in any case, told the whole
truth either to Armansky or to his sister. He still had one or
two secrets that he shared only with Salander.
He shook hands with Armansky.
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