The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium 3)

"Hello."

"The police are coming for you in a while. I've brought you some clothes. I hope they're the right size."

Salander looked distrustfully at the selection of neat, dark-coloured linen pants and pastel blouses.

Two uniformed Goteborg policewomen came to get her. Giannini was to go with them to the prison.

As they walked from her room down the hall, Salander noticed that several members of the staff were watching her with curiosity. She gave them a friendly nod, and some of them waved back. As if by chance, Jonasson was standing by the reception desk. They looked at each other and nodded. Even before they had turned the corner, Salander noticed that he was heading for her room.

During the entire procedure of transporting her to the prison, Salander did not say a word to the police.

Blomkvist had closed his iBook at 7:00 on Sunday morning. He sat for a moment at Salander's desk, listless, staring into space.

Then he went to her bedroom and looked at her gigantic king-size bed. After a while he went back to her office and flipped open his mobile to call Figuerola.

"Hi. It's Mikael."

"Hello there. Are you already up?"

"I've just finished working and I'm on my way to bed. I just wanted to call and say hello."

"Men who just call to say hello generally have ulterior motives."

He laughed.

"Blomkvist . . . you could come here and sleep if you like."

"I'd be terrible company."

"I'll get used to it."

He took a taxi to Pontonjargatan.

Berger spent Sunday in bed with her husband. They lay there talking and dozing. In the afternoon they got dressed and went for a walk down to the steamship wharf.

"SMP was a mistake," Berger said when they got home.

"Don't say that. Right now it's tough, but you knew it would be. Things will calm down after you've been there awhile."

"It's not the job. I can handle that. It's the atmosphere."

"I see."

"I don't like it there, but on the other hand, I can't walk out after a few weeks."

She sat at the kitchen table and stared morosely into space. Beckman had never seen his wife so stymied.

Inspector Faste met Salander for the first time at 12:30 on Sunday afternoon when a female police officer brought her into Erlander's office at Goteborg police headquarters.

"You were difficult enough to catch," Faste said.

Salander gave him a long look, satisfied herself that he was an idiot, and decided that she would not waste too many seconds concerning herself with his existence.

"Inspector Gunilla Waring will accompany you to Stockholm," Erlander said.

"All right," Faste said. "Then we'll leave at once. There are quite a few people who want to have a serious talk with you, Salander."

Erlander said goodbye to her. She ignored him.

They had decided for simplicity's sake to do the prisoner transfer to Stockholm by car. Waring drove. At the start of the journey Hans Faste sat in the front passenger seat with his head turned towards the back as he tried to have some exchange with Salander. By the time they reached Alingsas his neck was aching and he gave up.

Salander looked at the countryside. In her mind Faste did not exist.

Teleborian was right. She's fucking retarded, Faste thought. We'll see about changing that attitude when we get to Stockholm.

Every so often he glanced at Salander and tried to form an opinion of the woman he had been desperate to track down for such a long time. Even he had some doubts when he saw the skinny girl. He wondered how much she could weigh. He reminded himself that she was a lesbian and consequently not a real woman.

But it was possible that the bit about Satanism was an exaggeration. She did not look the type.

The irony was that he would have preferred to arrest her for the three murders she was originally suspected of, but reality had caught up with his investigation. Even a skinny girl can handle a weapon. Instead she had been taken in for assaulting the top leadership of Svavelsjo MC, and she was guilty of that crime, no question. There was forensic evidence related to the incident, which she no doubt intended to refute.

Figuerola woke Blomkvist at 1:00 in the afternoon. She had been sitting on her balcony and had finished reading her book about the idea of God in antiquity, listening all the while to Blomkvist's snores from the bedroom. It had been peaceful. When she went in to look at him it came to her, acutely, that she was more attracted to him than she had been to any other man in years.

It was a pleasant yet unsettling feeling. There he was, but he was not a stable element in her life.

They went down to Norr Malarstrand for a coffee. Then she took him home and to bed for the rest of the afternoon. He left her at 7:00. She felt a vague sense of loss a moment after he kissed her cheek and was gone.

At 8:00 on Sunday evening Linder knocked on Berger's door. She would not be sleeping there now that Beckman was home, and this visit was not connected with her job. But during the time she had spent at Berger's house they had both grown to enjoy the long conversations they had in the kitchen. She had a great liking for Berger. She recognized in her a desperate woman who succeeded in concealing her true nature. She went to work apparently calm, but in reality she was a bundle of nerves.

Linder suspected that her anxiety was not solely due to Poison Pen. But Berger's life and problems were none of her business. It was a friendly visit. She had come out here just to see Berger and to be sure that everything was all right. The couple were in the kitchen in a solemn mood. It seemed as though they had spent their Sunday working their way through one or two serious issues.

Beckman put on some coffee. Linder had been there only a few minutes when Berger's mobile rang.

Berger had answered every call that day with a feeling of impending doom.

"Berger," she said.

"Hello, Ricky."

Blomkvist. Shit. I haven't told him the Borgsjo file has disappeared.

"Hi, Micke."

"Salander was moved to the prison in Goteborg this evening, to wait for transport to Stockholm tomorrow."

"OK."

"She sent you a . . . well, a message."

"Oh?"

"It's pretty cryptic."

"What did she say?"

"She said: 'Fredriksson is Poison Pen.'"

Erika sat for ten seconds in silence while thoughts rushed through her head. Impossible. Peter isn't like that. Salander has to be wrong.

"Was that all?"

"That's the whole message. Do you know what it's about?"

"Yes."

"Ricky, what are you and that girl up to? She rang you to tip me off about Teleborian, and--"

"Thanks, Micke. We'll talk later."

She turned off her mobile and looked at Linder with an expression of absolute astonishment.

"Tell me," Linder said.

Linder was of two minds. Berger had been told that her assistant editor was the one sending the vicious emails. She talked non-stop. Then Linder had asked her how she knew Fredriksson was her stalker. Berger was silent. Linder noticed her eyes and saw that something had changed in her attitude. She was all of a sudden totally confused.

"I can't tell you."

"What do you mean you can't tell me?"

"Susanne, I just know that Fredriksson is responsible. But I can't tell you how I got that information. What can I do?"

"If I'm going to help you, you have to tell me."

"I . . . I can't. You don't understand."

Berger got up and stood at the kitchen window with her back to Linder. Finally she turned.

"I'm going to his house."

"You'll do nothing of the sort. You're not going anywhere, least of all to the home of somebody who obviously hates you."

Berger looked torn.

"Sit down. Tell me what happened. It was Blomkvist calling you, right?"

Berger nodded.

"I . . . today I asked a hacker to go through the home computers of the staff."

"Aha. So you've probably by extension committed a serious computer crime. And you don't want to tell me who your hacker is?"

"I promised I would never tell anyone. Other people are involved. Something that Mikael is working on."

"Does Blomkvist know about the emails and the breakin here?"

"No; he was just passing on a message."

Linder cocked her head to one side, and all of a sudden a chain of associations formed in her mind.

Erika Berger. Mikael Blomkvist. Millennium. Rogue policemen who broke in and bugged Blomkvist's apartment. Linder watching the watchers. Blomkvist working like a madman on a story about Lisbeth Salander.

The fact that Salander was a wizard at computers was widely known at Milton Security. No-one knew how she had come by her skills, and Linder had never heard any rumours that Salander might be a hacker. But Armansky had once said something about Salander's delivering quite incredible reports when she was doing personal investigations. A hacker . . .

But Salander is under guard on a ward in Goteborg.

It was absurd.

"Is it Salander we're talking about?" Linder said.

Berger looked as though she had touched a live wire.

"I can't discuss where the information came from. Not one word."

Linder laughed aloud.

It was Salander. Berger's confirmation of it could not have been clearer. She's completely off balance.

Yet it's impossible.

Under guard as she was, Salander nevertheless took on the job of finding out who Poison Pen was. Sheer madness.

Linder thought hard.

She could not understand the whole Salander story. She had met her maybe five times during the years she had worked at Milton Security and had never had so much as a single conversation with her. She regarded Salander as a sullen and asocial individual with a skin like a rhino. She had heard that Armansky himself had taken on Salander, and since she respected Armansky she assumed that he had good reason for his endless patience towards the sullen girl.

Fredriksson is Poison Pen.

Could she be right? What was the proof?

Linder then spent a long time questioning Erika on everything she knew about Fredriksson, what his role was at SMP, and how their relationship had been. The answers did not help her at all.