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

"Good morning, Miss Salander," he said at last.

"Ah, there you are," she said. "There's freshly brewed coffee and croissants in the kitchen."

"Thanks," he said, sighing in resignation.

He had, after all, bought the office with her money and at her request, but he had not expected her to turn up without warning. What's more, she had found and apparently read a gay porn magazine that he kept hidden in a desk drawer.

So embarrassing.

Or maybe not.

When it came to Salander, he felt that she was the most judgemental person he had ever met. But she never once raised an eyebrow at people's weaknesses. She knew that he was officially heterosexual, but his dark secret was that he was attracted to men; since his divorce fifteen years ago he had been making his most private fantasies a reality.

It's funny, but I feel safe with her.

Since she was in Gibraltar anyway, Salander had decided to visit MacMillan, the man who handled her finances. She had not been in touch with him since just after the New Year, and she wanted to know if he had been busy ruining her ever since.

But there had not been any great hurry, and it was not for him that she had gone straight to Gibraltar after her release. She did it because she felt a burning desire to get away from everything, and in that respect Gibraltar was an excellent choice. She had spent almost a week getting drunk, and then a few days having sex with the German businessman, who eventually introduced himself as Dieter. She doubted it was his real name but had not bothered to check. He spent the days sitting in meetings and the evenings having dinner with her before they went back to his or her room.

He was not at all bad in bed, Salander thought, although he was a bit out of practice and sometimes needlessly rough.

Dieter seemed genuinely astonished that on sheer impulse she had picked up an overweight German businessman who was not even looking for it. He was indeed married, and he was not in the habit of being unfaithful or seeking female company on his business trips. But when the opportunity was presented on a platter in the form of a thin, tattooed young woman, he could not resist the temptation. Or so he said.

Salander did not much care what he said. She had not been looking for anything more than recreational sex, but she was gratified that he actually made an effort to satisfy her. It was not until the fourth night, their last together, that he had a panic attack and started going on about what his wife would say. Salander thought he should keep his mouth shut and not tell his wife a thing.

But she did not tell him what she thought.

He was a grown man and could have said no to her invitation. It was not her problem if he was now attacked by feelings of guilt, or if he confessed anything to his wife. She had lain with her back to him and listened for fifteen minutes, until finally she rolled her eyes in exasperation, turned over, and straddled him.

"Do you think you could take a break from the worrywart stuff and get me off again?" she said.

Jeremy MacMillan was a very different story. He held zero erotic attraction for her. He was a crook. Amusingly enough, he looked a lot like Dieter. He was forty-eight, a bit overweight, with greying, dark-blond curly hair that he combed straight back from a high forehead. He wore thin gold-rimmed glasses.

Cambridge-educated, he had once been a business lawyer and a stockbroker in London. He had had a promising future and was a partner in a law firm that was engaged by big corporations and wealthy yuppies interested in real estate and tax planning. He had spent the go-go eighties hanging out with nouveau riche celebrities. He had drunk hard and snorted coke with people that he really did not want to wake up with the next morning. He had never been charged with anything, but he did lose his wife and two kids along with his job when he mismanaged several transactions and tottered drunk into a mediation hearing.

Without thinking too much about it, he sobered up and fled London with his tail between his legs. Why he picked Gibraltar he did not know, but in 1991 he went into partnership with a local attorney and opened a modest back-street law office which officially dealt with much less glamorous matters: estate planning, wills, and the like. Unofficially, MacMillan & Marks also helped to set up P.O. box companies and acted as gatekeepers for a number of shady figures in Europe. The firm was barely making ends meet when Salander selected Jeremy MacMillan to administer the 2.5 billion Swedish kronor she had stolen from the collapsing empire of the Swedish financier Hans-Erik Wennerstrom.

MacMillan was a crook, no doubt about it, but she regarded him as her crook, and he had surprised himself by being impeccably honest in his dealings with her. She had first hired him for a simple task. For a modest fee he had set up a string of P.O. box companies for her to use; she put a million dollars into each of them. She had contacted him by telephone and had been nothing more than a voice from afar. He never tried to discover where the money came from. He had done what she asked and took a 5 percent commission. A little while later she had transferred a large sum of money that he was to use to set up a corporation, Wasp Enterprises, which then acquired a substantial apartment in Stockholm. His dealings with Salander were becoming quite lucrative, even if still on a modest scale.

Two months later she had paid a visit to Gibraltar. She had called him and suggested dinner in her room at the Rock Hotel, which was if not the biggest hotel in Gibraltar, then certainly the most famous. He was not sure what he had expected, but he could not believe that his client was this doll-like girl who looked as if she were in her early teens. He thought he was the butt of some outlandish practical joke.

He soon changed his mind. The strange young woman talked with him impersonally, without ever smiling or showing any warmth. Or coolness, for that matter. He had sat paralysed as, over the course of a few minutes, she obliterated the professional facade of sophisticated respectability that he was always so careful to maintain.

"What is it that you want?" he had asked.

"I've stolen a sum of money," she replied with great seriousness. "I need a crook who can administer it."

He had stared at her, wondering whether she was deranged, but politely he played along. She might be a possible mark for a con game that could bring in a small income. Then he had sat as if struck by lightning when she explained whom she had stolen the money from, how she'd done it, and what the amount was. The Wennerstrom affair was the hottest topic of conversation in the world of international finance.

"I see."

The possibilities flew through his head.

"You're a skilled business lawyer and stockbroker. If you were an idiot you would never have gotten the jobs you did in the eighties. However, you behaved like an idiot and managed to get yourself fired."

He winced.

"In the future I will be your only client."

She had looked at him with the most ingenuous expression he had ever seen.

"I have two conditions. The first is that you never ever commit a crime or get mixed up in anything that could create problems for us and focus the authorities' attention on my companies and accounts. The second is that you never lie to me. Never ever. Not a single time. And not for any reason. If you lie to me, our business relationship will terminate instantly, and if you make me angry enough I will ruin you."

She poured him a glass of wine.

"There's no reason to lie to me. I already know everything worth knowing about your life. I know how much you make in a good month and how much in a bad month. I know how much you spend. I know that you never really have enough money. I know that you owe PS120,000 in both long-term and short-term debts, and that you always have to take risks and skim some money to make the loan payments. You wear expensive clothes and try to keep up appearances, but in reality you've gone to the dogs and haven't bought a new sports jacket in several months. But you did take an old jacket in to have the lining mended two weeks ago. You used to collect rare books but have been gradually selling them off. Last month you sold an early edition of Oliver Twist for PS760."

She stopped talking and fixed him with her gaze. He swallowed hard.

"Last week you actually made a killing. A quite clever fraud perpetrated against that widow you represent. You robbed her of PS6,000, which she'll probably never miss."

"How the hell do you know that?"

"I know that you were married, that you have two children in England who don't want to see you, and that you've taken the big leap since your divorce and now have primarily homosexual relationships. You're probably ashamed of that and avoid the gay clubs, and you avoid being seen in town with any of your male friends. You regularly cross the border into Spain to meet men."

MacMillan was shaken to the core. And he was suddenly terrified. He had no idea how she had come by all this information, but she knew enough to destroy him.

"And I'm only going to say this one time. I don't give a shit who you have sex with. It's none of my business. I want to know who you are, but I will never use what I know. I won't threaten you or blackmail you."

MacMillan was no fool. He was perfectly aware, of course, that her knowledge of all that information about him constituted a threat. She was in control. For a moment he considered picking her up and throwing her over the edge of the terrace, but he restrained himself. He had never in his life been so scared.

"What do you want?" he managed to say.

"I want to have a partnership with you. You will bring to a close all the other business you're handling and will work exclusively for me. You will make more money from my company than you could ever dream of making any other way."

She explained what she required him to do, and how she wanted the arrangements to be made.

"I want to be invisible," she said. "And I want you to take care of my affairs. Everything has to be legitimate. Whatever money I make on my own will not have any connection to our business together."

"I understand."

"You have one week to phase out your other clients and put a stop to all your little schemes."

He also realized that he had been given an offer that would never come around again. He thought about it for sixty seconds and then accepted. He had only one question.

"How do you know that I won't swindle you?"

"Don't even think about it. You'd regret it for the rest of your miserable life."

He had no reason to cook the books. Salander had made him an offer that had the potential of such a silver lining that it would have been idiotic to risk it for bits of change on the side. As long as he was relatively discreet and did not get involved in any financial chicanery, his future would be assured.

Accordingly, he had no thought of swindling Ms. Salander.

So he went straight, or as straight as a burned-out lawyer who was administering an astronomical sum of stolen money could go.

Salander was simply not interested in the management of her finances. MacMillan's job was to invest her money and see to it that there were funds to cover the credit cards she used. She told him how she wanted her finances to be handled. His job was to make sure it was done.

A large part of the money had been invested in gilt-edged funds that would provide her with economic independence for the rest of her life, even if she chose to live it recklessly and dissolutely. It was from these funds that her credit card bills were paid.