CHAPTER 13
Tuesday, 17.v
Figuerola woke at 6.10 on Tuesday morning, took a long
run along Norr Mälarstrand, showered, and clocked in at
police headquarters at 8.10. She prepared a memorandum
on the conclusions she had arrived at the day before.
At 9.00 Edklinth arrived. She gave him twenty minutes to
deal with his post, then knocked on his door. She waited
while he read her four pages. At last he looked up.
“The chief of Secretariat,” he said.
“He must have approved loaning out Mårtensson. So he
must know that Mårtensson is not at Counter-Espionage,
even though according to Personal Protection that’s where
he is.”
Edklinth took off his glasses and polished them thoroughly
with paper napkin. He had met Chief of Secretariat Albert
Shenke at meetings and internal conferences on countless
occasions, but he could not claim to know the man well.
Shenke was rather short, with thin reddish-blond hair, and
by now rather stout. He was about fifty-five and had worked
at S.I.S. for at least twenty-five years, possibly longer. He
had been chief of Secretariat for a decade, and was
assistant chief before that. Edklinth thought him taciturn,
and a man who could act ruthlessly when necessary. He
had no idea what he did in his free time, but he had a
memory of having once seen him in the garage of the
police building in casual clothes, with a golf bag slung over
his shoulder. He had also run into him once at the Opera.
“There was one thing that struck me,” Figuerola said
“What’s that?”
“Evert Gullberg. He did his military service in the ’40s and
became an accountant or some such, and then in the ’50s
he vanished into thin air.”
“And?”
“When we were discussing this yesterday, we were talking
about him as if he were some sort of a hired killer.”
“It sounds far-fetched, I know, but—”
“It struck me that there is so little background on him that it
seems almost like a smokescreen. Both IB and S.I.S.
established cover companies outside the building in the
’50s and ’60s.”
“I was wondering when you’d think of that,” Edklinth said.
“I’d like permission to go through the personnel files from
the ’50s,” Figuerola said.
“No,” Edklinth said, shaking his head. “We can’t go into the
archives without authorization from the chief of Secretariat,
and we don’t want to attract attention until we have more to
go on.”
“So what next?”
“Mårtensson,” Edklinth said. “Find out what he’s working
on.”
Salander was studying the vent window in her room when
she heard the key turn in the door. In came Jonasson. It
was past 10.00 on Tuesday night. He had interrupted her
was past 10.00 on Tuesday night. He had interrupted her
planning how to break out of Sahlgrenska hospital.
She had measured the window and discovered that her
head would fit through it and that she would not have much
problem squeezing the rest of her body through. It was
three storeys to the ground, but a combination of torn
sheets and a ten-foot extension cord from a floor lamp
would dispose of that problem.
She had plotted her escape step by step. The problem was
what she would wear. She had knickers, a hospital
nightshirt and a pair of plastic flip-flops that she had
managed to borrow. She had 200 kronor in cash from
Annika Giannini to pay for sweets from the hospital snack
shop. That should be enough for a cheap pair of jeans and
a T-shirt at the Salvation Army store, if she could find one
in Göteborg. She would have to spend what was left of the
money on a call to Plague. Then everything would work
out. She planned on landing in Gibraltar a few days after
she escaped, and from there she would create a new
identity somewhere in the world.
Jonasson sat in the visitor’s chair. She sat on the edge of
her bed.
“Hello, Lisbeth. I’m sorry I’ve not come to see you the past
few days, but I’ve been up to my eyes in A. & E. and I’ve
also been made a mentor for a couple of interns.”
also been made a mentor for a couple of interns.”
She had not expected Jonasson to make special visits to
see her.
He picked up her chart and studied her temperature graph
and the record of medications. Her temperature was
steady, between 37 and 37.2 degrees, and for the past
week she had not taken any headache tablets.
“Dr Endrin is your doctor. Do you get along with her?”
“She’s alright,” Salander said without enthusiasm.
“Is it O.K. if I do an examination?”
She nodded. He took a pen torch out of his pocket and
bent over to shine it into her eyes, to see how her pupils
contracted and expanded. He asked her to open her mouth
and examined her throat. Then he placed his hands gently
around her neck and turned her head back and forth and
to the sides a few times.
“You don’t have any pain in your neck?” he said.
She shook her head.
“How’s the headache?”
“I feel it now and then, but it passes.”
“The healing process is still going on. The headache will
eventually go away altogether.”
Her hair was still so short that he hardly needed to push
aside the tufts to feel the scar above her ear. It was
healing, but there was still a small scab.
“You’ve been scratching the wound. You shouldn’t do that.”
She nodded. He took her left elbow and raised the arm.
“Can you lift it by yourself?”
She lifted her arm.
“Do you have any pain or discomfort in the shoulder?”
She shook her head.
“Does it feel tight?”
“A little.”
“I think you have to do a bit more physio on your shoulder
muscles.”
“It’s hard when you’re locked up like this.”
He smiled at her. “That won’t last. Are you doing the
exercises the therapist recommended?”
She nodded.
He pressed his stethoscope against his wrist for a moment
to warm it. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and untied
the strings of her nightshirt, listened to her heart and took
her pulse. He asked her to lean forward and placed the
stethoscope on her back to listen to her lungs.
“Cough.”
She coughed.
“O.K., you can do up your nightshirt and get into bed. From
a medical standpoint, you’re just about recovered.”
She expected him to get up and say he would come back in
a few days, but he stayed, sitting on the bed. He seemed to
be thinking about something. Salander waited patiently.
“Do you know why I became a doctor?” he said.
She shook her head.
“I come from a working-class family. I always thought I
wanted to be a doctor. I’d actually thought about becoming
a psychiatrist when I was a teenager. I was terribly
intellectual.”
intellectual.”
Salander looked at him with sudden alertness as soon as
he mentioned the word “psychiatrist”.
“But I wasn’t sure that I could handle the studies. So when I
finished school I studied to be a welder and I even worked
as one for several years. I thought it was a good idea to
have something to fall back on if the medical studies didn’t
work out. And being a welder wasn’t so different from being
a doctor. It’s all about patching up things. And now I’m
working here at Sahlgrenska and patching up people like
you.”
She wondered if he were pulling her leg.
“Lisbeth … I’m wondering …”
He then said nothing for such a long time that Salander
almost asked what it was he wanted. But she waited for him
to speak.
“Would you be angry with me if I asked you a personal
question? I want to ask you as a private individual, not as a
doctor. I won’t make any record of your answer and I won’t
discuss it with anyone else. And you don’t have to answer if
you don’t want to.”
“What is it?”
“Since you were shut up at St Stefan’s when you were
twelve, you’ve refused to respond when any psychiatrist
has tried to talk to you. Why is that?”
Salander’s eyes darkened, but they were utterly
expressionless as she looked at Jonasson. She sat in
silence for two minutes.
“Why?” she said at last.
“To be honest, I’m not really sure. I think I’m trying to
understand something.”
Her lips curled a little. “I don’t talk to crazy-doctors because
they never listen to what I have to say.”
Jonasson laughed. “O.K. Tell me … what do you think of
Peter Teleborian?”
Jonasson threw out the name so unexpectedly that
Salander almost jumped. Her eyes narrowed.
“What the hell is this, ‘Twenty Questions’? What are you
after?” Her voice sounded like sandpaper.
Jonasson leaned forward, almost too close.
“Because a … what did you call it … a crazy-doctor by the
name of Peter Teleborian, who’s somewhat renowned in my
name of Peter Teleborian, who’s somewhat renowned in my
profession, has been to see me twice in the past few days,
trying to convince me to let him examine you.”
Salander felt an icy chill run down her spine.
“The district court is going to appoint him to do a forensic
psychiatric assessment of you.”
“And?”
“I don’t like the man. I’ve told him he can’t see you. Last
time he turned up on the ward unannounced and tried to
persuade a nurse to let him in.”
Salander pressed her lips tight.
“His behaviour was a bit odd and a little too eager. So I
want to know what you think of him.”
This time it was Jonasson’s turn to wait patiently for
Salander’s reply.
“Teleborian is a beast,” she said at last.
“Is it something personal between the two of you?”
“You could say that.”
“I’ve also had a conversation with an official who wants me
to let Teleborian see you.”
“And?”
“I asked what sort of medical expertise he thought he had
to assess your condition and then I told him to go to hell.
More diplomatically than that, of course. And one last
question. Why are you talking to me?”
“You asked me a question, didn’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m a doctor and I’ve studied psychiatry. So why
are you talking to me? Should I take it to mean that you
have a certain amount of trust in me?”
She did not reply.
“Then I’ll choose to interpret it that way. I want you to know
this: you are my patient. That means that I work for you
and not for anyone else.”
She gave him a suspicious look. He looked back at her for
a moment. Then he spoke in a lighter tone of voice.
“From a medical standpoint, as I said, you’re more or less
healthy. You don’t need any more weeks of rehab. But
unfortunately you’re a bit too healthy.”
“Why ‘unfortunately’?”
He gave her a cheerful smile. “You’re getting better too
fast.”
“What do you mean?”
“It means that I have no legitimate reason to keep you
isolated here. And the prosecutor will soon be having you
transferred to a prison in Stockholm to await trial in six
weeks. I’m guessing that such a request will arrive next
week. And that means that Teleborian will be given the
chance to observe you.”
She sat utterly still. Jonasson seemed distracted and bent
over to arrange her pillow. He spoke as if thinking out loud.
“You don’t have much of a headache or any fever, so Dr
Endrin is probably going to discharge you.” He stood up
suddenly. “Thanks for talking to me. I’ll come back and see
you before you’re transferred.”
He was already at the door when she spoke.
“Dr Jonasson?”
He turned towards her.
“Thank you.”
He nodded curtly once before he went out and locked the
door.
Salander stared for a long time at the locked door. And
then she lay back and stared up at the ceiling.
That was when she felt that there was something hard
beneath her head. She lifted the pillow and saw to her
surprise a small cloth bag that had definitely not been
there before. She opened it and stared in amazement at a
Palm Tungsten T3 hand-held computer and battery
charger. Then she looked more closely at the computer
and saw the little scratch on the top left corner. Her heart
skipped a beat. It’s my Palm. But how… In amazement she
glanced over at the locked door. Jonasson was a catalogue
of surprises. In great excitement she turned on the
computer at once and discovered that it was password-protected.
She stared in frustration at the blinking screen. It seemed
to be challenging her. How the hell did they think I would…
Then she looked in the cloth bag and found at the bottom
a scrap of folded paper. She unfolded it and read a line
written in an elegant script:
You’re the hacker, work it out! / Kalle B.
Salander laughed aloud for the first time in weeks. Touché.
She thought for a few seconds. Then she picked up the
stylus and wrote the number combination 9277, which
stylus and wrote the number combination 9277, which
corresponded to the letters W-A-S-P on the keyboard. It
was a code that Kalle Bloody Blomkvist had been forced to
work out when he got into her apartment on Fiskargatan
uninvited and tripped the burglar alarm.
It did not work.
She tried 52553, which corresponded to the letters K-A-L-L-E.
That did not work either. Since Blomkvist presumably
intended that she should use the computer, he must have
chosen a simple password. He had used the signature
Kalle, which normally he hated. She free-associated. She
thought for a moment. It must be some insult. Then she
typed in 74774, which corresponded to the word P-I-P-P-I –
Pippi Bloody Longstocking.
The computer started up.
There was a smiley face on the screen with a cartoon
speech balloon:
She found the document [Hi Sally] at the top of the list. She
clicked on it and read:
First of all, this is only between you and me.
Your lawyer, my sister Annika, has no idea that
you have access to this computer. It has to
stay that way.
I don’t know how much you understand of what
is happening outside your locked room, but
strangely enough (despite your personality),
you have a number of loyal idiots working on
your behalf. I have already established an
elite body called The Knights of the Idiotic
Table. We will be holding an annual dinner at
which we’ll have fun talking crap about you.
(No, you’re not invited.)
So, to the point. Annika is doing her best to
prepare for your trial. One problem of course
is that she’s working for you and is bound and
fettered by one of those damned
confidentiality oaths. So she can’t tell me what
the two of you discuss, which in this case is a
bit of a handicap. Luckily she does accept
information.
We have to talk, you and I.
Don’t use my email.
I may be paranoid, but I have reason to
suspect that I’m not the only one reading it. If
you want to deliver something, go to Yahoo
group [Idiotic_Table]. I.D. Pippi and the
password is p9i2p7p7i. / Mikael
Salander read his letter twice, staring in bewilderment at
the Palm. After a period of computer celibacy, she was
suffering from massive cyber-abstinence. And she
wondered which big toe Blomkvist had been thinking with
when he smuggled her a computer but forgot that she
needed a mobile to connect to the Net.
She was still thinking when she heard footsteps in the
corridor. She turned the computer off at once and shoved it
under her pillow. As she heard the key in the door she
realized that the cloth bag and charger were still in view on
the bedside table. She reached out and slid the bag under
the covers and pressed the coil of cord into her crotch.
She lay passively looking up at the ceiling when the night
nurse came in, said a polite hello, and asked how she was
doing and whether she needed anything.
Salander told her that she was doing fine and that she
wanted a pack of cigarettes. This request was turned down
in a firm but friendly tone. She was given a pack of nicotine
gum. As the nurse was closing the door Salander glimpsed
gum. As the nurse was closing the door Salander glimpsed
the guard on his chair out in the corridor. She waited until
she heard the nurse’s steps receding before she once
again picked up her Palm.
She turned it on and searched for connectivity.
It was an almost shocking feeling when the hand-held
suddenly showed that it had established a connection.
Contact with the Net. Inconceivable.
She jumped out of bed so fast that she felt a pain in her
injured hip. She looked around the room. How? She walked
all the way round, examining every nook and cranny. No,
there was no mobile in the room. And yet she had
connectivity. Then a crooked grin spread across her face.
The connection was radio-controlled and locked into a
mobile via Bluetooth, which had a range of ten to twelve
metres. Her eyes lit upon an air vent just below the ceiling.
Kalle Bloody Blomkvist had somehow planted a mobile just
outside her room. That could be the only explanation.
But why not smuggle in the mobile too? Ah, of course. The
batteries.
Her Palm had to be recharged only once every three days.
A mobile that was connected, if she surfed it hard, would
burn out its batteries in much less time. Blomkvist – or
more likely somebody he had hired and who was out there
more likely somebody he had hired and who was out there
– would have to change the batteries at regular intervals.
But he had sent in the charger for her Palm. He isn’t so
stupid after all.
Salander began by deciding where to keep the hand-held.
She had to find a hiding place. There were plug sockets by
the door and in the panel behind the bed, which provided
electricity for her bedside lamp and digital clock. There was
a recess where a radio had been removed. She smiled.
Both the battery charger and the Palm could fit in there.
She could use the socket inside the bedside table to
charge up the Palm during the day.
*
Salander was happy. Her heart was pounding hard when
she started up the hand-held for the first time in two
months and ventured on to the Internet.
Surfing on a Palm hand-held with a tiny screen and a stylus
was not the same thing as surfing on a PowerBook with a
17” screen. But she was connected. From her bed at
Sahlgrenska she could now reach the entire world.
She started by going on to a website that advertised rather
uninteresting pictures by an unknown and not especially
skilled amateur photographer called Gil Bates in Jobsville,
Pennsylvania. Salander had once checked it out and
Pennsylvania. Salander had once checked it out and
confirmed that the town of Jobsville did not exist.
Nevertheless, Bates had taken more than 200 photographs
of the community and created a gallery of small thumbnails.
She scrolled down to image 167 and clicked to enlarge it. It
showed the church in Jobsville. She put her cursor on the
spire of the church tower and clicked. She instantly got a
pop-up dialog box that asked for her I.D. and password.
She took out her stylus and wrote the word Remarkable on
the screen as her I.D. and A(89)Cx#magnolia as the
password.
She got a dialog box with the text [ERROR – you have the
wrong password] and a button that said [OK – Try again].
Lisbeth knew that if she clicked on [OK – Try again] and
tried a different password, she would get the same dialog
box again – for years and years, for as long as she kept
trying. Instead she clicked on the [O] in [ERROR].
The screen went blank. Then an animated door opened
and a Lara Croft-like figure stepped out. A speech bubble
materialized with the text [WHO GOES THERE?].
She clicked on the bubble and wrote Wasp. She got the
instant reply [PROVE IT – OR ELSE …] as the animated
Lara Croft unlocked the safety catch on her gun. Salander
knew it was no empty threat. If she wrote the wrong
password three times in a row the site would shut down and
the name Wasp would be struck from the membership list.
Carefully she wrote the password MonkeyBusiness.
The screen changed again and now had a blue
background with the text:
[Welcome to Hacker Republic, citizen Wasp. It
has been 56 days since your last visit. There
are 11 citizens online. Do you want to (a)
Browse the Forum (b) Send a Message (c)
Search the Archive (d) Talk (e) Get Laid?]
She clicked on [(d) Talk] and then went to the menu
selection [Who’s online?] and got a list with the names
Andy, Bambi, Dakota, Jabba, BuckRogers, Mandrake,
Pred, Slip, SisterJen, SixOfOne, and Trinity.
Wasp wrote.
SixOfOne wrote.
Trinity wrote.
Dakota wrote.
Salander was not sure, but she suspected that Dakota was
a woman. The other citizens online, including the one who
called himself SisterJen, were guys. Hacker Republic had a
total (the last time she was connected) of sixty-two citizens,
of whom four were female.
of whom four were female.
Wasp wrote.
Dakota wrote.
Trinity wrote.
He got abuse from five directions at once.
Of the sixty-two citizens, Wasp had met two face to face.
Plague, who for some strange reason was not online, was
one. Trinity was the other. He was English and lived in
London. Two years earlier she had met him for a few hours
when he helped her and Blomkvist in the hunt for Harriet
Vanger by doing an illegal tapping of a landline in St
Albans. Salander fumbled with the clumsy stylus and
wished she had a keyboard.
Mandrake wrote.
She punched letters.
Pred wrote.
Slip wrote.
Three chatters at once.
Salander summed up her situation in five lines, which were
Salander summed up her situation in five lines, which were
greeted by a worried muttering.
Trinity wrote.
Bambi wrote.
SisterJen wrote, and that was followed by a spate of
disparaging remarks about Wasp’s mental abilities.
Salander smiled. The conversation resumed with a
contribution from Dakota.
SixOfOne wrote.
Wasp wrote.
Mandrake wrote.
The citizens of Hacker Republic did not generally spread
computer viruses. On the contrary – they were hackers
and consequently implacable adversaries of those idiots
who created viruses whose sole purpose was to sabotage
the Net and crash computers. The citizens were information
junkies and wanted a functioning Internet that they could
hack.
But their proposal to shut down the Swedish government
was not an idle threat. Hacker Republic comprised a very
exclusive club of the best of the best, an elite force that
any defence organization in the world would have paid
enormous sums to use for cyber-military purposes, if the
citizens could be persuaded to feel any kind of loyalty to
any state. Which was not very likely.
But they were every one of them computer wizards, and
they were well versed in the art of contriving viruses. Nor
did they need much convincing to carry out particular
campaigns if the situation warranted. Some years earlier a
citizen of Hacker Republic, who in their private life was a
software developer in California, had been cheated out of
a patent by a hot dot.com company that had the nerve to
take the citizen to court. This caused the activists in Hacker
Republic to devote a startling amount of energy for six
months to hacking and destroying every computer owned
by that company. All the company’s secrets and emails –
along with some fake documents that might lead people to
think that its C.E.O. was involved in tax fraud – were
gleefully posted on the Net, along with information about
the C.E.O.’s now not-so-secret mistress and pictures from
a party in Hollywood in which he could be seen snorting
cocaine.
The company went under in six months, and several years
later some members of the “people’s militia” in Hacker
Republic, who did not easily forget an enemy, were still
haunting the former C.E.O.
If fifty of the world’s foremost hackers decided to launch a
coordinated attack against an entire country, the country
coordinated attack against an entire country, the country
might survive, but not without having serious problems.
The costs would certainly run into the billions if Salander
gave it the thumbs-up. She thought for a moment.
Dakota wrote.
Mandrake wrote.
Bambi wrote.
Trinity wrote.
Salander leaned back against the pillow and followed the
conversation with a smile. She wondered why she, who had
such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and
blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a
bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet. The
fact was that if Salander could claim to have any sort of
family or group affiliation, then it was with these lunatics.
None of them actually had a hope of helping her with the
problems she had with the Swedish state. But she knew
that, if the need arose, they would devote both time and
cunning to performing effective demonstrations of their
powers. Through this network she could also find herself
hideouts abroad. It had been Plague’s contacts on the Net
who had provided her with a Norwegian passport in the
name of Irene Nesser.
Salander had no idea who the citizens of Hacker Republic
were, and she had only a vague notion of what they did
when they were not on the Net – the citizens were uniformly
vague about their identities. SixOfOne had once claimed
that he was a black, male American of Catholic origin living
in Toronto. He could just as easily be white, female and
Lutheran, and living in Skövde.
The one she knew best was Plague – he had introduced
her to the family, and nobody became a member of this
exclusive club without very strong recommendations. And
for anyone to become a member they had also to be
known personally to one other citizen.
On the Net, Plague was an intelligent and socially gifted
citizen. In real life he was a severely overweight and
socially challenged thirty-year-old living on disability benefit
in Sundbyberg. He bathed too seldom and his apartment
smelled like a monkey house. Salander visited him only
once in a blue moon. She was content to confine her
dealings with him to the Net.
As the chat continued, Wasp downloaded mail that had
been sent to her private mailbox at Hacker Republic. One
was from another member, Poison, and contained an
improved version of her program Asphyxia 1.3, which was
available in the Republic’s archive for its citizens. Asphyxia
was a program that could control other people’s computers
via the Internet. Poison said that he had used it
successfully, and that his updated version included the
latest versions of Unix, Apple and Windows. She emailed
him a brief reply and thanked him for the upgrade.
During the next hour, as evening approached in the United
States, another half-dozen citizens had come online and
welcomed back Wasp before joining the debate. When
Salander logged off, the others were discussing to what
extent the Swedish Prime Minister’s computer could be
made to send civil but crazy emails to other heads of state.
A working group had been formed to explore the matter.
Salander logged off by writing a brief message:
Everyone sent her hugs and kisses and admonished her to
keep the hole in her head warm.
Only when Salander had logged out of Hacker Republic did
she go into Yahoo and log on to the private newsgroup
[Idiotic_Table]. She discovered that the group had two
members – herself and Blomkvist. The mailbox had one
message, sent on May 15. It was entitled [Read this first].
Hi Sally. The situation is as follows: The police
haven’t found your apartment and don’t have
access to the D.V.D. of Bjurman’s rape. The
disk is very strong evidence. I don’t want to
turn it over to Annika without your approval. I
have the keys to your apartment and a
have the keys to your apartment and a
passport in name of Nesser.
But the police do have the rucksack you had
in Gosseberga. I don’t know if it contains
anything compromising.
Salander thought for a moment. Don’t think so. A half-empty thermos of coffee, some apples, a change of
clothes. No problem.
You’re going to be charged with G.B.H.
against or the attempted murder of
Zalachenko, and G.B.H against Carl-Magnus
Lundin at Stallarholmen – i.e., because you
shot him in the foot and broke his jaw when
you kicked him. But a source in the police
whom I trust tells me that the evidence in each
case is woolly. The following is important:
(1) Before Zalachenko was shot he denied
everything and claimed that it could only have
been Niedermann who shot and buried you.
He laid a charge against you for attempting to
murder him. The prosecutor is going to go on
about this being the second time you have
tried to kill him.
tried to kill him.
(2) Neither Lundin or Sonny Nieminen has
said a word about what happened at
Stallarholmen. Lundin has been arrested for
kidnapping Miriam. Nieminen has been
released.
Salander had already discussed all of this with Giannini.
That was nothing new. She had told Giannini everything
that had happened in Gosseberga, but she had refrained
from telling her anything about Bjurman.
What I think you haven’t understood are the
rules of the game.
It’s like this. Säpo got saddled with Zalachenko
in the middle of the Cold War. For fifteen years
he was protected, no matter what havoc he
wrought. Careers were built on Zalachenko.
On any number of occasions they cleaned up
behind his rampages. This is all criminal
activity: Swedish authorities helping to cover
up crime against individual citizens.
If this gets out, there’ll be a scandal that will
affect both the conservative and social
affect both the conservative and social
democratic parties. Above all, people in high
places within Säpo will be exposed as
accomplices in criminal and immoral activities.
Even though by now the statute of limitations
has run out on the specific instances of crime,
there’ll still be a scandal. It involves big beasts
who are either retired now or close to
retirement.
They will do everything they can to reduce the
damage to themselves and their group, and
that means you’ll once again be a pawn in
their game. But this time it’s not a matter of
them sacrificing a pawn – it’ll be a matter of
them actively needing to limit the damage to
themselves personally. So you’ll have to be
locked up again.
This is how it will work. They know that they
can’t keep the lid on the Zalachenko secret for
long. I’ve got the story, and they know that
sooner or later I’m going to publish it. It
doesn’t matter so much, of course, now that
he’s dead. What matters to them is their own
survival. The following points are therefore
high on their agenda:
(1) They have to convince the district court
(the public, in effect) that the decision to lock
you up in St Stefan’s in 1991 was a legitimate
one, that you really were mentally ill.
(2) They have to separate the “Salander
affair” from the “Zalachenko affair”. They’ll try
to create a situation where they can say that
“certainly Zalachenko was a fiend, but that
had nothing to do with the decision to lock up
his daughter. She was locked up because she
was deranged – any claims to the contrary are
the sick fantasies of bitter journalists. No, we
did not assist Zalachenko in any crime – that’s
the delusion of a mentally ill teenage girl.”
(3) The problem is that if you’re acquitted, it
would mean that the district court finds you not
only not guilty, but also not a nutcase. And
that would have to mean that locking you up in
1991 was illegal. So they have, at all costs, to
condemn you again to the locked psychiatric
ward. If the court determines that you are
mentally ill, the media’s interest in continuing
to dig around in the “Salander affair” will die
away. That is how the media work.
Are you with me?
All of this she had already worked out for herself. The
problem was that she did not know what she should do.
Lisbeth – seriously – this battle is going to be
decided in the mass media and not in the
courtroom. Unfortunately the trial is going to
be held behind closed doors “to protect your
privacy”.
The day that Zalachenko was shot there was a
robbery at my apartment. There were no signs
on my door of a break-in, and nothing was
touched or moved – except for one thing. The
folder from Bjurman’s summer cabin with
Björck’s report was taken. At the same time my
sister was mugged and her copy of the report
was also stolen. That folder is your most
important evidence.
I have let it be known that our Zalachenko
documents are gone, disappeared. In fact I
had a third copy that I was going to give to
Armansky. I made several copies of that one
and have tucked them away in safe places.
Our opponents – who include several high-
powered figures and certain psychiatrists –
are of course also preparing for the trial
together with Prosecutor Ekström. I have a
source who provides me with some info. on
what’s going on, but I suspect that you might
have a better chance of finding out the
relevant information. This is urgent.
The prosecutor is going to try to get you
locked up in the psychiatric ward. Assisting
him he has your old friend Peter Teleborian.
Annika won’t be able to go out and do a media
campaign in the same way that the
prosecution can (and does), leaking
information as they see fit. Her hands are tied.
But I’m not lumbered with that sort of
restriction. I write whatever I want – and I also
have an entire magazine at my disposal.
Two important details are still needed:
(1) First of all, I want to have something that
shows that Prosecutor Ekström is today
working with Teleborian in some inappropriate
manner, and that the objective once more is to
confine you to a nuthouse. I want to be able to
go on any talk show on T.V. and present
go on any talk show on T.V. and present
documentation that annihilates the
prosecution’s game.
(2) To wage a media war I must be able to
appear in public to discuss things that you
may consider your private business. Hiding
behind the arras in this situation is a wildly
overrated tactic in view of all that has been
written about you since Easter. I have to be
able to construct a completely new media
image of you, even if that, in your opinion,
means invading your privacy – preferably with
your approval. Do you understand what I
mean?
She opened the archive in [Idiotic_Table]. It contained
twenty-six documents.
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