The Girl in the Spider's Web Page 6

  “I know.”

  “Most people were probably relieved when he took off. The air at work became easier to breathe, and people began to trust each other again, at least up to a point. But Grant wasn’t happy, and more importantly his lawyers weren’t happy either. Balder had taken with him whatever he had been developing at Solifon, and there was a rumour—maybe because no-one really knew what it was—that he was onto something sensational that could revolutionize the quantum computer, which Solifon was working on.”

  “And from a purely legal point of view whatever he’d produced belonged to the company and not to him personally.”

  “Correct. So even though Balder had been going on about theft, when all was said and done he himself was the thief. Any day now things are likely to blow up in court, as you know, unless Balder manages to use whatever he has to frighten the lawyers. That information is his life insurance, so he says, and it may well be true. But in the worst-case scenario it could also be…”

  “…the death of him.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Casales said. “We’re picking up stronger indications that something serious is getting under way, and your boss tells me that you might be able to help us.”

  Grane looked at the storm that was now raging outside, and longed desperately to go home and get away from it all. Yet she took off her coat and sat down again, feeling uneasy.

  “How can I help?”

  “What do you think he found out?”

  “Do I take that to mean that you haven’t managed either to bug him or hack him?”

  “I’m not going to answer that one, sweetheart. But what do you think?”

  Grane remembered how Frans Balder had stood in the doorway of her office not so long ago and muttered about dreaming of “a new kind of life”—whatever he may have meant by that.

  “I assume you know,” she said, “I met him before he joined Solifon, because he claimed that his research had been stolen. I didn’t warm to him much, at first. Then there was talk in-house of getting him some form of protection, so I met him again. His transformation over the last few weeks was incredible. Not only because he had shaved off his beard, tidied up his hair and lost some weight. He was also mellower, even a little bit unsure of himself. I could tell he was rattled and at one point he did say that he thought there were people who wanted to harm him.”

  “In what way?”

  “Not physically, he said. It was more his research and his reputation they were after. But I’m not so sure, deep down, he believed it would stop there, so I suggested he get a guard dog. I thought a dog would be excellent company for a man who lived out in the suburbs in far too big a house. But he wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I can’t have a dog now,’ he said rather sharply.”

  “Why’s that, do you think?”

  “I really don’t know. But I got the feeling there was something weighing on him: he didn’t protest too much when I arranged for a sophisticated alarm system in his house. It has just been installed.”

  “By whom?”

  “A company we often use, Milton Security.”

  “Good. But my recommendation is to move him to a safe house.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “We think the risk is real.”

  “OK,” Grane said. “If you send over some documentation I’ll have a word with my superior right away.”

  “I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not sure what I can get my hands on. We’ve been having…some computer issues.”

  “Can an agency like yours really afford that sort of thing?”

  “No, you’re right. Let me get back to you, sweetheart,” she said, and hung up.

  Grane remained quite still and looked out at the storm lashing against the window with increasing fury. Then she picked up her Blackphone and rang Balder. She let it ring and ring. Not just to warn him and see to it that he move to a safe place at once, but also because she suddenly wanted to know what he had meant when he said: “These last few days I’ve been dreaming about a new kind of life.”

  No-one would have believed that at that moment Balder was fully occupied with his son.

  —

  Blomkvist remained sitting for a while after Brandell had left, drinking his Guinness and staring into the distance. Behind him, Arne and his gang were laughing at something. But Blomkvist was so engrossed in his thoughts that he heard nothing, and hardly even noticed that Amir had sat down next to him and was giving him the latest weather forecast.

  The temperature was dropping. The first snow of the year was expected to fall, and not in any pleasant or picturesque way. The misery was going to come blasting in sideways in the worst storm the country had seen for a long time.

  “Could get hurricane-force winds,” Amir said, and Blomkvist, who still was not listening, just said, “That’s good.”

  “Good?”

  “Yes…well…better than no weather at all.”

  “I suppose. But are you all right? You look shaken up. Was it a useful meeting?”

  “Sure, it was fine.”

  “But what you got to hear rattled you, didn’t it?”

  “I’m not certain. Things are just a mess right now. I’m thinking of quitting Millennium.”

  “I thought you basically were that magazine.”

  “I thought so, too. But I guess there’s an end to everything.”

  “That’s probably true,” Amir said. “My old man used to say that there’s even an end to eternity.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “I think he was talking about love everlasting. It was shortly before he left my mother.”

  Blomkvist snorted. “I haven’t been so good at everlasting love myself. On the other hand…”

  “Yes, Mikael?”

  “There’s a woman I used to know, she’s been out of my life for some time now.”

  “Tricky.”

  “Well, yes it is. But now I’ve suddenly had a sign of life from her, or at least I think I did, and perhaps that’s what’s got me looking a bit funny.”

  “Right.”

  “I’d better get myself home. What do I owe you?”

  “We can settle up another time.”

  “Great, take care, Amir,” he said. He walked past the regulars, who threw a few random comments at him, and stepped into the storm.

  It was a near-death experience. Gusts of wind blew straight through his body, but in spite of them he stood still for a while, lost in old memories. He thought about a dragon tattoo on a skinny, pale back, a cold snap on Hedeby Island in the midst of a decades-old missing person case, and a dug-up grave in Gosseberga that was nearly the resting place of a woman who refused to give up. Then he walked home slowly. For some reason he had trouble getting the door open, had to jiggle the key around. He kicked off his shoes and sat at his computer and searched for information on Frans Balder, Professor.

  But he was alarmingly unfocused and instead found himself wondering, as he had so many times before: Where had she disappeared to? Apart from some news from her one-time employer, Dragan Armansky, he had not heard a word about her. It was as if she had vanished off the face of the earth and, although they lived in more or less the same part of town, he had never caught a glimpse.

  Of course, the person who had turned up at Brandell’s apartment that day could have been someone else. It was possible, but not likely. Who else would come stomping in like that? It must have been Salander, and Pippi…that was typical.

  The nameplate on her apartment door on Fiskargatan was V. Kulla and he could well see why she did not use her real name. It was all too searchable and associated with one of the most high-profile trials the country had ever seen. Admittedly, it was not the first time that the woman had vanished in a puff of smoke. But ever since that day when he had knocked on her door on Lundagatan and given her hell for having written a personal investigation report about him which was rather too thorough, they had never been apart for so long. It felt a little strange, didn’t
it? After all, Salander was his…well, what the hell was she in point of fact?

  Hardly his friend. One sees one’s friends. Friends don’t only get in touch by hacking into your computer. Yet he still felt this bond with Salander and, above all, he worried about her. Her old guardian Holger Palmgren used to say that Lisbeth Salander would always manage. Despite her appalling childhood, or maybe because of it, she was one hell of a survivor, and there was probably a lot of truth in that. But one could never be sure, not with a woman of such a background, and with that knack for making enemies.

  Perhaps she really had gone off the rails, as Armansky had hinted when he and Blomkvist met over lunch at Gondolen about six months ago. It was a spring day, a Saturday, and Armansky had offered to buy beer and snaps and all the rest of it. Even though they were ostensibly meeting as two old friends, there was no doubt that Armansky only wanted to talk about Salander and, with the help of a few drinks, indulge in a spot of sentimentality.

  Among other things, Armansky told Blomkvist that his company, Milton Security, had supplied a number of personal alarms to a nursing home in Högdalen, good equipment, he said.

  But not even the best equipment in the world will help you if the electricity goes off and nobody can be bothered to fix it, and that is precisely what happened. There was a power outage at the home late one evening, and in the course of that night one of the residents, a lady called Rut Åkerman, fell and broke her femur, and she lay there for hour after hour pressing the button on her alarm to no avail. By the morning she was in critical condition and, since the papers were just then focusing heavily on negligence in care for the elderly, the whole thing became a big deal.

  Happily, the old lady pulled through. But she also happened to be the mother of a senior figure in the Swedish Democrats party. When it emerged on the party’s website, Unpixelated, that Armansky was an Arab—which incidentally he was not at all, although it was true that he was occasionally called “the Arab” in jest—there was an explosion in the posted comments. Hundreds of anonymous writers said that’s what happens “when you let coons supply your technology.” Armansky took it very badly, especially when the trolling affected his family.

  But then suddenly, as if by magic, all those posts were no longer anonymous. You could see the names and addresses of those responsible, their job titles and how old they were. It was beautifully neat, as if they had all filled in a form. You could say that the entire site had been unpixelated, and of course it became clear that the posts did not just come from crackpots, but also from many established citizens, even some of Armansky’s competitors in the security business. For a long time the hitherto-anonymous perpetrators were completely powerless. They could not understand what had happened. Eventually someone managed to close the site down, but nobody had any idea who lay behind the attack—except for Dragan Armansky himself.

  “It was classic Salander,” he said. “You know, I hadn’t heard from her for ages and was convinced that she couldn’t give a damn about me, or anybody else for that matter. But then this happened, and it was fantastic. She had stood up for me. I sent an effusive thanks by e-mail, and to my surprise an answer came back. Do you know what she wrote?”

  “No.”

  “Just one single sentence: ‘How the hell can you protect that creep Sandvall at the Östermalm clinic?’ ”

  “And who’s Sandvall?”

  “A plastic surgeon to whom we gave personal protection because he’d been threatened. He’d pawed a young Estonian woman on whom he had performed breast surgery and she happened to be the girlfriend of a known criminal.”

  “Oops.”

  “Precisely, not such a clever thing to do. I answered Salander to say that I didn’t think Sandvall was one of God’s little angels any more than she did. But I pointed out that we don’t have the right to make that kind of judgment. Even male chauvinist pigs are entitled to some degree of security. Since Sandvall was under serious threat and asked for our help we gave it to him—at double the usual rate.”

  “But Salander didn’t buy your argument?”

  “Well, she didn’t reply, at least not by e-mail. But I suppose you could say she gave a different sort of answer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She marched up to our guards at the clinic and ordered them to keep calm. I even think she gave them my regards. Then she walked straight past all the patients and nurses and doctors, went into Sandvall’s office and broke three of his fingers and made the most terrifying threats against him.”

  “Jesus!”

  “That’s putting it mildly. Stark staring mad. I mean, to do something like that in front of so many witnesses and in a doctor’s office on top of it all. And of course there was a huge fuss afterwards, a lot of brouhaha about lawsuits and prosecutions and the whole damn thing. You can just imagine: breaking the fingers of a surgeon who’s lined up to perform a string of lucrative nips and tucks…It’s the kind of thing that gets top lawyers seeing dollar signs everywhere.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing. It all came to nothing, apparently because the surgeon himself didn’t want to take things any further. But still, Mikael, it was insane. No person in their right mind steams into a top surgeon’s office in broad daylight and breaks his fingers. Not even Salander.”

  Blomkvist actually thought that it sounded pretty logical, according to Salander logic, that is, a subject in which he was more or less expert. He did not doubt for one second that that doctor had done far worse than grope the wrong girlfriend. But even so, he could not help wondering if Salander hadn’t screwed up in this case, if only on the score of risk analysis.

  It occurred to him that she might have wanted to get into trouble again, maybe to put some spice back into her life. But that was probably unfair. He knew nothing of her motives or her current circumstances. As the storm rattled the windowpanes and he sat there in front of his computer Googling Frans Balder, he tried to see beauty in the fact that they had now bumped into each other in this indirect way. It would seem that Salander was the same as ever and perhaps, who knows, she had given him a lead. Linus Brandell had irritated him from the word “go,” but when Salander dropped into the story, he saw it all with new eyes. If she had taken the time to help Frans Balder then he could at least take a closer look at it, and with some luck find out a bit more about Salander at the same time.

  Why had she gotten herself involved in the first place?

  She was not just some itinerant IT consultant, after all. Yes, she could fly into a rage over life’s injustices, but for a woman who had no qualms about hacking to get indignant about a computer breach, that was a little bit surprising. Breaking the fingers of a plastic surgeon, fine. But hackers? That was very much like throwing stones at glass houses.

  There must be some backstory. Maybe she and Balder knew each other. It was not inconceivable and so he tried Googling their names together, but without getting any hits, at least not any that had relevance.

  He focused on Frans Balder. The professor’s name generated two million hits but most of them were scientific articles and commentaries. It did not seem as if Balder gave interviews, and because of that, there was a sort of mythological gloss over the details of his life, as if they had been romanticized by admiring students.

  Apparently it had been assumed that Balder was more or less mentally disabled as a child until one day he walked into the headmaster’s office at his school on Ekerö island and pointed out a mistake in the ninth grade maths books to do with so-called imaginary numbers. The mistake was corrected in subsequent editions and the following spring Balder won a national mathematics competition. He was reported as being able to speak backwards and create his own long palindromes. In an early school essay later published online he took a critical view of H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds on the grounds that he could not understand how beings superior to us in every way could fail to grasp something so basic as the differences between bacterial flora on Mars
and on Earth.

  After graduating from secondary school he studied computer sciences at Imperial College in London and defended his thesis on algorithms in neural networks, which was considered revolutionary. He became the youngest ever professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. These days he was regarded as a world authority on the hypothetical concept of “technological singularity,” the state at which computer intelligence will have overtaken our own.

  In most photographs he looked like a dishevelled troll with small eyes, his hair standing on end. Yet he married the glamorous actress Hanna Lind. The couple had a son who, according to evening newspaper coverage, under the headline HANNA’S GREAT SORROW, was mentally disabled, even though the boy did not—at least not in the picture accompanying the article—look in the least bit impaired. The marriage fell apart and, amidst a heated custody battle in Nacka district court, the enfant terrible of the theatre, Lasse Westman, stepped into the fray to declare aggressively that Balder should not be allowed to look after his son because he cared more about “the intelligence of computers than that of children.” Blomkvist concentrated his efforts on trying to understand Balder’s research, and for a long time he sat engrossed in a complicated text about quantum processors in computers.

  Afterwards he went into Documents and opened a file he had created a year or so earlier. It was called [Lisbeth stuff]. He had no idea whether she was still hacking into his computer, but he could not help hoping that she did and wondered if he should not after all type out a little greeting. Long, personal letters were not her thing. He would do better to go for something brisk and a bit cryptic. He wrote:

 

  CHAPTER 5

  NOVEMBER 20