The Girl in the Spider's Web Read online

  “Something that you don’t actually know so much about.”

  “No, we lost contact. Balder lost contact with pretty much everyone. But I understand enough to know that it must have been something serious. He had always preached openness and enthused about the Wisdom of Crowds, all that stuff; the importance of using the knowledge of many, the whole Linux way of thinking. But at Solifon he apparently kept every comma secret, even from those who were closest to him, and then—wham bam—he gave notice and went home, and now he’s sitting there in his house in Saltsjöbaden and doesn’t even go out into the garden or give a damn how he looks.”

  “So what you’ve got, Linus, is a story about a professor who seems to be under pressure and who doesn’t care what he looks like—though it’s not clear how the neighbours can see that, if he never goes outside?”

  “Yes, but I think…”

  “Listen, this could be an interesting story. But unfortunately it isn’t for me. I’m no IT reporter—as someone so wisely wrote the other day, I’m a caveman. I’d recommend you contact Raoul Sigvardsson at the Swedish Morning Post. He knows everything about that world.”

  “No, no, Sigvardsson is a lightweight. This is way above his head.”

  “I think you underestimate him.”

  “Come on, now, don’t chicken out. This could be your comeback, Blomkvist.”

  Blomkvist made a tired gesture towards Amir, who was wiping a table not far from them.

  “Can I give you some advice?” Blomkvist said.

  “What? Yes…sure.”

  “Next time you have a story to sell, don’t try to explain to the reporter what’s in it for him. Do you know how many times people have played me that tune? ‘This is going to be the biggest thing in your career. Bigger than Watergate!’ You’d do better with just some basic matter-of-fact information, Linus.”

  “I just meant…”

  “Yes, what actually did you mean?”

  “That you should talk to Frans. I think he would like you. You’re the same uncompromising kind of guy.”

  It was as if Brandell had suddenly lost his self-confidence and Blomkvist wondered if he had not been unnecessarily tough. As a general principle, he tended to be friendly and encouraging towards people who gave him tip-offs, however weird they sounded. Not just because there might be a good story even in something that sounded crazy, but also because he recognized that often he was their last straw. There were many who turned to him when everyone else had stopped listening. He was the last hope, and there was never any excuse to be scornful.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ve had a really bad day and I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic.”

  “That’s OK.”

  “And you know,” Blomkvist said. “There’s one thing which interests me about this story. You said you had a visit from a female hacker.”

  —

  Alona Casales was not one to become nervous easily and she rarely had trouble staying on topic. She was forty-eight, tall, and outspoken, with a voluptuous figure and small intelligent eyes which could make anybody feel insecure. She often seemed to see straight through people and did not suffer from a surfeit of deference to superiors. She would give anyone a dressing down, even the Attorney General if he came calling. That was one of the reasons why Ed the Ned got on so well with her. Neither of them attached much importance to status; all they cared about was ability.

  Nevertheless, she had completely lost it with the head of Sweden’s Security Police. This had nothing to do with Helena Kraft. It was because of the drama unfolding in the open-plan office behind her. Admittedly they were all used to Needham’s explosions of rage. But something told her right away that what was going on now was on an altogether different scale.

  The man seemed paralyzed. While Casales sat there blurting some confused words down the line, people gathered around him and all of them, without exception, looked scared. But perhaps because she was in a state of shock, Casales did not hang up or say that she would call back later. She let herself be put through to Gabriella Grane, that charming young analyst whom she had met and tried to seduce in Washington. Even though Alona had not succeeded in taking her to bed, she had been left with a deep feeling of pleasure.

  “Hello, my dear,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Not so bad,” Grane answered. “We’re having some terrible storms, but otherwise everything’s fine.”

  “I really enjoyed that last time we saw each other.”

  “Absolutely, it was nice. I was hungover the whole of the next day. But I don’t suppose you’re calling to ask me out.”

  “Unfortunately not. I’m calling because we’ve picked up signs of a serious threat to a Swedish scientist.”

  “Who?”

  “For a long time we had trouble understanding the information, or even working out which country it concerned. The communication was encrypted and used only vague codenames, but still, once we got a few small pieces of the puzzle we managed…what the hell…”

  “What?”

  “One second…”

  Casales’s computer screen blinked, then went blank, and as far as she could see the same thing was happening all over the office floor. For a moment she wondered what to do, but carried on the conversation; it might just be a power outage, after all, although the overhead lights seemed to be working.

  “I’m still here,” said Grane.

  “Thanks, I appreciate it. Sorry about this. It’s complete chaos here. Where was I?”

  “You were talking about pieces of the puzzle.”

  “Right, yes, we put two and two together, because there’s always one person who’s careless, however professional they try to be, or who…”

  “Yes?”

  “Um…talks, gives an address or something, in this case it was more like…”

  Casales fell silent again. None other than Commander Jonny Ingram, one of the most senior people in the NSA with contacts high up in the White House, had come onto the office floor. Ingram was trying to appear as composed as usual. He even cracked some joke to a group sitting further away. But he was not fooling anyone. Beneath his polished and tanned exterior—ever since his time as head of the cryptological centre in Oahu he was suntanned all year round—you could sense something nervous in his expression. Now he seemed to want everybody’s attention.

  “Hello, are you still there?” Grane said on the other end of the line.

  “I’m going to have to leave you, unfortunately. I’ll call you back,” Casales said, and hung up.

  At that moment she became very worried indeed. There was a feeling in the air that something terrible had happened, maybe another major terrorist attack. But Ingram carried on with his soothing act and, even though there was sweat on his upper lip and forehead, he kept repeating that it was nothing serious. Most likely a virus, he said, which had found its way into the intranet, despite all the security precautions.

  “To be on the safe side, we’ve shut down our servers,” he said, and for a moment he really did manage to calm things down. “What the hell,” people seemed to be saying, “a virus isn’t such a big deal.”

  But then Ingram started spouting such vague statements that Casales could not stop herself from shouting:

  “Tell us what’s actually happening!”

  “We don’t know that much yet. But it’s possible that our systems have been hacked. We’ll get back to you as soon as we know more,” Ingram said, looking concerned, and a murmur ran through the room.

  “Is it the Iranians again?” somebody wondered.

  “We think…” Ingram said.

  He got no further. Ed Needham, the person who should have been standing there in the first place, explaining what was happening, interrupted him brusquely and got to his feet, a bear of a man. At that moment there was no denying that he was an imposing sight. Gone was the deflated Needham from a minute before; he now exuded a tremendous sense of determination.

  “No,” he hissed. “It’s a hacker, a f
ucking superhacker, and I’m going to cut his balls off.”

  —

  “The female hacker doesn’t really have anything to do with this story,” said Brandell, nursing his beer. “She was more like Balder’s social project.”

  “But she seemed to know her stuff.”

  “Or she was just lucky. She talked a lot of rubbish.”

  “So you met her?”

  “Yes, just after Balder took off for Silicon Valley.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Almost a year. I’d moved our computers into my apartment on Brantingsgatan. My life was not great, to put it mildly. I was single and broke and hung over, my place looked like hell. I had just spoken to Frans on the telephone, and he’d been going on like some boring old dad. There was a lot of: Don’t judge her by how she looks, appearances can be deceptive blah blah, and hey, he said that to me! I’m not exactly the ideal son-in-law myself. I’ve never worn a jacket and tie in my entire life, and if anyone knows what people look like in the hacker community, then I do. Whatever, so I was sitting there waiting for this girl. Thought that she would at least knock. But she just opened the door and walked in.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Bloody awful…but then, she was also sexy in a weird way. But dreadful!”

  “Linus, I’m not asking you to rate her looks. I just want to know what she was wearing and if she maybe mentioned what her name was.”

  “I have no idea who she was,” Brandell said, “although I did recognize her from somewhere—I had the feeling that it was something bad. She was tattooed and pierced and all that crap and looked like a heavy rocker or goth or punk, plus she was as thin as hell.”

  Hardly aware that he was doing it, Blomkvist gestured to Amir to pull him another Guinness.

  “What happened?” Blomkvist said.

  “Well, what can I say? I guess I thought that we didn’t have to get going right away, so I sat down on my bed—there wasn’t much else to sit on—and suggested that we might have a drink or something first. But do you know what she did then? She asked me to leave. She ordered me out of my own home, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. Obviously I refused. I was like: ‘I do actually live here.’ But she said: ‘Piss off, get lost,’ and I didn’t see what choice I had so I was out for a while. When I got back she was lying there on my bed, smoking—how sick is that? And reading a book about string theory or something. Maybe I gave her some sort of dodgy look, what do I know, and she said that she wasn’t planning on having sex with me, not even a little. ‘Not even a little,’ she said, and I don’t think she looked me in the eye even once. She just announced that we’d had a Trojan, a RAT, and that she recognized the pattern in the breach, the level of originality in the programming. ‘You’ve been blown,’ she said. And then she walked out.”

  “Without saying goodbye?”

  “Without a single damn word.”

  “Christ.”

  “But to be honest I think she was bullshitting. The guy at the NDRE, who did the same investigation a little while later, and who probably knew much more about these kinds of attacks, was very clear that you couldn’t draw any conclusions like that, and that however much he searched through our computer he couldn’t find any spyware. But still his guess was—Molde was his name, by the way, Stefan Molde—that we’d been hacked.”

  “This woman, did she ever introduce herself in any way?”

  “I did actually press her, but all she would say was that I could call her Pippi. Pretty surly she was too. It was obvious that that wasn’t her real name, but still…”

  “What?”

  “I thought it suited her somehow.”

  “You know,” Blomkvist said, “I was just about to head home again.”

  “Yes, I noticed that.”

  “But now everything’s changed in a pretty major way. Did you say that your professor Balder knew this woman?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “In that case I want to talk to him as soon as possible.”

  “Because of the woman?”

  “Something like that.”

  “OK, fine,” Brandell said thoughtfully. “But you won’t find any contact details for him. He’s become so bloody secretive, like I said. Do you have an iPhone?”

  “I do.”

  “In that case you can forget it. Frans sees Apple as more or less in the pocket of the NSA. To talk to him you’ll have to buy a Blackphone or at least borrow an Android and download a special encryption programme. But I’ll see to it that he gets in touch with you, so you can arrange to meet in some secure place.”

  “Great, Linus, thanks.”

  CHAPTER 4

  NOVEMBER 20

  Grane had just put on her coat to go home when Casales called again, and at first she was irritated, not only because of the confusion last time. She wanted to get going before the storm got out of hand. The news on the radio had forecast winds of up to sixty-seven miles per hour and the temperature falling to –10°C, and she was not dressed for it.

  “I’m sorry it took a while,” Casales said. “We’ve had an insane morning. Total chaos.”

  “Here too,” Grane said politely, looking at her watch.

  “But I do have something important to tell you, as I said, at least I think I do. It isn’t that easy to analyze. I just started checking out a group of Russians, did I mention that?” Casales said.

  “No.”

  “Well, there are probably Germans and Americans involved and possibly one or more Swedes.”

  “What sort of group are we talking about?”

  “Criminals, sophisticated criminals who don’t rob banks or sell drugs. Instead they steal corporate secrets and confidential business information.”

  “Black hats.”

  “They’re not just hackers. They also blackmail and bribe people. Possibly they even commit old-fashioned crimes, like murder. I don’t have much on them yet, to be honest, mostly codenames and unconfirmed links, and then a couple of real names, some young computer engineers in junior positions. The group is active in suspected industrial espionage and that’s why the case has ended up on my desk. We’re afraid that cutting-edge American technology has fallen into Russian hands.”

  “I understand.”

  “But it isn’t easy to get at them. They’re good at encryption and, no matter how hard I try, I haven’t been able to get any closer to their leadership than to catch that their boss goes by the name of Thanos.”

  “Thanos?”

  “Yes, derived from Thanatos, the god of death in Greek mythology, the one who’s the son of Nyx—night—and twin brother to Hypnos—sleep.”

  “Real cloak-and-dagger stuff.”

  “Actually, it’s pretty childish. Thanos is a supervillain in Marvel Comics, you know that comic book series with heroes like the Hulk, Iron Man and Captain America. First of all it’s not particularly Russian, but more than that it’s…how do I put this…?”

  “Both playful and arrogant?”

  “Yes, like a bunch of cocky college kids messing around, and that really annoys me. In fact there’s a whole lot that worries me about this story, and that’s why I got so worked up when we learned through our signals surveillance that someone in the network may have defected, somebody who could maybe give us some insight—if only we could get our hands on this guy before they do. But now that we’ve looked more carefully, we realize it wasn’t at all what we thought.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The guy who quit wasn’t some criminal, but the opposite, an honest person who resigned from a company where this organization has moles, someone who presumably stumbled on some key information…”

  “Keep going.”

  “In our view this person is now seriously under threat. He needs protection. But until recently we had no idea where to look for him, we didn’t even know which company he’d worked at. But now we think we’ve zeroed in,” Casales said. “You see, in the last few days one
of these characters mentioned something about this guy, said that ‘with him all the bloody Ts went up in smoke.’ ”

  “The bloody Ts?”

  “Yes, cryptic and strange, but it had the advantage of being specific and highly searchable. While ‘bloody Ts’ didn’t give us anything, Ts generally, words beginning with T in conjunction with companies, high-tech firms of course, kept leading us to the same place—to Nicolas Grant and his maxim: Tolerance, Talent, and Teamwork.”

  “We’re talking Solifon here, right?” Grane said.

  “We think so. At least it felt like everything had fallen into place, so we began to investigate who had left Solifon recently. The company always has such high staff turnover, it’s part of their philosophy—that talent should flow in and out. But then we started to think specifically about those Ts. Are you familiar with them?”

  “Not really.”

  “They’re Grant’s recipe for creativity. By tolerance he means that you need to be open to unconventional ideas and unconventional people. Talent—it doesn’t just achieve results, it attracts other gifted people and helps create an environment that people want to be in. And all these talents have to form a team. As I’m sure you know, Solifon was a remarkable success story, producing pioneering technology in a whole series of fields. But then this new genius popped up, a Swede, and with him…”

  “…all the bloody Ts went up in smoke.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And it was Frans Balder.”

  “I don’t think he normally has any problem with tolerance, or with teamwork for that matter. But from the beginning there was apparently something toxic about him. He refused to share anything and in no time at all he managed to destroy the rapport among the elite researchers at the company, especially when he started accusing people of being thieves and copycats. There was a scene with the owner, too. But Grant has refused to tell us what it was about—just that it was something private. Soon after, Balder gave notice.”