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

Falldin, still relatively unsure in his role, had acquiesced. He approved a directive that was immediately entered into the secret protocol, making the Section responsible for Zalachenko's safety and debriefing. It also laid down that information about Zalachenko would not leave the prime minister's office. By signing this directive, Falldin had in practice demonstrated that he had been informed, but it also prevented him from ever discussing the matter. In short, he could forget about Zalachenko. But Falldin had required that one person in his office, a hand-picked state secretary, also be informed. He would function as a contact person in matters relating to the defector. Gullberg allowed himself to agree to this. He did not anticipate having any problem handling a state secretary.

The chief of SIS was pleased. The Zalachenko matter was now constitutionally secured, which in this case meant that the chief had covered his back. Gullberg was pleased as well. He had managed to create a quarantine, which meant that he would be able to control the flow of information. He alone controlled Zalachenko.

When he got back to Ostermalm he sat at his desk and wrote down a list of the people who knew about Zalachenko: himself; Bjorck; the operations chief of the Section, Hans von Rottinger; Assistant Chief Fredrik Clinton; the Section's secretary, Eleanor Badenbrink; and two officers whose job it was to compile and analyse any intelligence information that Zalachenko might contribute. Seven individuals who over the coming years would constitute a special Section within the Section. He thought of them as the Inner Circle.

Outside the Section, the information was known by the chief of SIS, the assistant chief, and the head of Secretariat. Besides them, the prime minister and a state secretary. A total of twelve. Never before had a secret of this magnitude been known to such a very small group.

Then Gullberg's expression darkened. The secret was known also to a thirteenth person. Bjorck had been accompanied at Zalachenko's original reception by a lawyer, Nils Erik Bjurman. To include Bjurman in the special Section would be out of the question. Bjurman was not a real security policeman--he was really no more than a trainee at SIS--and he did not have the requisite experience or skills. Gullberg considered various alternatives and then chose to steer Bjurman carefully out of the picture. He used the threat of imprisonment for life, for treason, if Bjurman were to breathe so much as one syllable about Zalachenko, and at the same time he offered inducements, promises of future assignments, and finally he used flattery to bolster Bjurman's feeling of importance. He arranged for Bjurman to be hired by a well-regarded law firm, which then provided him with a steady stream of assignments to keep him busy. The only problem was that Bjurman was such a mediocre lawyer that he was hardly capable of exploiting his opportunities. He left the firm after ten years and opened his own practice, which eventually became a law office at Odenplan.

Over the following years Gullberg kept Bjurman under discreet but regular surveillance. That was Bjorck's job. It was not until the end of the eighties that he stopped monitoring Bjurman, at which time the Soviet Union was heading for collapse and Zalachenko had ceased to be a priority. For the Section, Zalachenko had at first been thought of as a potential breakthrough in the Palme mystery. Palme had accordingly been one of the first subjects that Gullberg discussed with him during the long debriefing.

The hopes for a breakthrough, however, were soon dashed, since Zalachenko had never operated in Sweden and had little knowledge of the country. On the other hand, Zalachenko had heard the rumour of a "Red Jumper," a highly placed Swede--or possibly other Scandinavian politician--who worked for the KGB.

Gullberg drew up a list of names that were connected to Palme: Carl Lidbom, Pierre Schori, Sten Andersson, Marita Ulvskog, and a number of others. For the rest of his life, Gullberg would come back again and again to that list, but he never found an answer.

Gullberg was suddenly a big player: he was welcomed with respect in the exclusive club of selected warriors, all known to one another, where the contacts were made through personal friendship and trust, not through official channels and bureaucratic regulations. He met James Jesus Angleton, and he got to drink whisky at a discreet club in London with the chief of MI6. He was one of the elite.

He was never going to be able to tell anyone about his triumphs, not even in posthumous memoirs. And there was the ever-present anxiety that the Enemy would notice his overseas journeys, that he might attract attention, that he might involuntarily lead the Russians to Zalachenko. In that respect, Zalachenko was his worst enemy.

During the first year, the defector had lived in an anonymous apartment owned by the Section. He did not exist in any registry or in any public document. Those within the Zalachenko unit thought they had plenty of time before they had to plan his future. Not until the spring of 1978 was he given a passport in the name of Karl Axel Bodin, along with a laboriously crafted personal history--a fictitious but verifiable background in Swedish records.

By that time it was already too late. Zalachenko had gone and fucked that stupid whore Agneta Sofia Salander, nee Sjolander, and he had heedlessly told her his real name--Zalachenko. Gullberg began to believe that Zalachenko was not quite right in the head. He suspected that the Russian defector wanted to be exposed. It was as if he needed a platform. How else to explain the fact that he had been so fucking stupid?

There were whores, there were periods of excessive drinking, and there were incidents of violence with bouncers and others. On three occasions Zalachenko was arrested by the Swedish police for drunkenness, and twice more in connection with fights in bars. Every time, the Section had to intervene discreetly and bail him out, seeing to it that documents disappeared and records were altered. Gullberg assigned Bjorck to babysit the defector almost around the clock. It was not an easy job, but there was no alternative.

Everything could have gone fine. By the early eighties Zalachenko had calmed down and begun to adapt. But he never gave up the whore Salander--and worse, he had become the father of Camilla and Lisbeth Salander.

Lisbeth Salander.

Gullberg pronounced the name with displeasure.

Ever since the girls were nine or ten, he had had a bad feeling about Lisbeth. He did not need a psychiatrist to tell him that she was not normal. Bjorck had reported that she was vicious and aggressive towards her father and that she seemed to be not in the least afraid of him. She did not say much, but she expressed her dissatisfaction in a thousand other ways. She was a problem in the making, but how gigantic this problem would become was something Gullberg could never have imagined in his wildest dreams. What he most feared was that the situation in the Salander family would give rise to a social welfare report that named Zalachenko. Time and again he urged the man to cut his ties and disappear from their lives. Zalachenko would give his word, and then would always break it. He had other whores. He had plenty of whores. But after a few months he was always back with the Salander woman.

That bastard Zalachenko. An intelligence agent who let his cock rule any part of his life was obviously not a good intelligence agent. It was as though the man thought himself above all normal rules. If he could have screwed the whore without beating her up every time, that would have been one thing, but Zalachenko was guilty of repeated assault against his girlfriend. He seemed to find it amusing to beat her just to provoke his babysitters in the Zalachenko group.

Gullberg had no doubt that Zalachenko was a sick fuck, but he was in no position to pick and choose among defecting GRU agents. He had only one, a man very aware of his value to Gullberg.

The Zalachenko unit had taken on the role of clean-up patrol. It was undeniable. Zalachenko knew that he could take liberties and that the unit would resolve whatever problems there might be. When it came to Agneta Sofia Salander, he exploited his hold over them to the maximum.

Not that there weren't warnings. When Salander was twelve, she stabbed Zalachenko. His wounds had not been life-threatening, but he was taken to St. Goran's hospital and the group had more of a mop-up job to do than ever. Gullberg

then made it crystal clear to Zalachenko that he must never have any more dealings with the Salander family, and Zalachenko had promised. A promise he kept for more than six months, before he turned up at Agneta Sofia Salander's place and beat her so savagely that she ended up in a nursing home for the rest of her life.

But Gullberg had not foreseen that the Salander girl would go so far as to make a Molotov cocktail. That day had been utter chaos. All manner of investigations loomed, and the future of the Zalachenko unit--of the whole Section, even--had hung by a thread. If Salander talked, Zalachenko's cover was at risk, and if that were to happen a number of operations put in place across Europe over the past fifteen years might have to be dismantled. Furthermore, there was a possibility that the Section would be subjected to official scrutiny, and that had to be prevented at all costs.

Gullberg had been consumed with worry. If the Section's archives were opened, a number of practices would be revealed that were not always consistent with the dictates of the constitution, not to mention their years of investigations of Palme and other prominent Social Democrats. Just a few years after Palme's assassination that was still a sensitive issue. Prosecution of Gullberg and several other employees of the Section would inevitably follow. Even worse, some ambitious journalist would float the theory that the Section was behind the assassination of Palme, and that in turn would lead to even more damaging speculation and investigation. The most worrying aspect of all this was that the command of the Security Police had changed so much that not even the overall chief of SIS now knew about the existence of the Section. All contacts with SIS stopped at the desk of the new assistant chief of Secretariat, and he had been on the staff of the Section for ten years.

A mood of acute panic, even fear, overtook the unit. It was in fact Bjorck who proposed the solution. Peter Teleborian, a psychiatrist, had become associated with SIS's department of Counter-Espionage in a different case. He had been key as a consultant in connection with Counter-Espionage's surveillance of a suspected industrial spy. At a critical stage of the investigation, they needed to know how the person in question might react if subjected to a great deal of stress. Teleborian had offered concrete advice, and SIS had succeeded in averting a suicide, managing to turn the spy in question into a double agent.

After Salander's attack on Zalachenko, Bjorck had surreptitiously engaged Teleborian as an outside consultant to the Section.

The solution to the problem had been very simple. Karl Axel Bodin would disappear into rehabilitative custody. Agneta Sofia Salander would necessarily disappear into an institution for long-term care. All the police reports on the case were collected at SIS and transferred by way of the assistant head of Secretariat to the Section.

Teleborian was assistant head physician at St. Stefan's psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala. All that was needed was a legal psychiatric report, which Bjorck and Teleborian drafted together, and then a brief and, as it turned out, uncontested decision in a district court. It was a question only of how the case was presented. The constitution had nothing to do with it. It was, after all, a matter of national security.

Besides, Salander was obviously insane. A few years in an institution would do her nothing but good. Gullberg had approved the operation.

This solution to their multiple problems presented itself at a time when the Zalachenko unit was on its way to being dissolved. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist, and Zalachenko's usefulness was definitively a thing of the past.

The unit procured a generous severance package from Security Police funds. They arranged for him to have the best rehabilitative care, and after six months they put him on a flight to Spain. From that moment on, they made it clear to Zalachenko that he and the Section were going their separate ways. It had been one of Gullberg's last responsibilities. One week later he reached retirement age and handed the reins to his chosen successor, Fredrik Clinton. Thereafter Gullberg acted only as an adviser in especially sensitive matters. He stayed in Stockholm for another three years and worked almost daily at the Section, but the number of his assignments decreased, and gradually he disengaged himself. He then returned to his hometown of Laholm and did some work from there. At first he had travelled frequently to Stockholm, but he made these journeys less and less often, and eventually not at all.

He had not even thought about Zalachenko for months, until the morning he discovered the daughter in every newspaper headline.

Gullberg followed the story in a state of bewilderment. It was no accident, of course, that Bjurman had been Salander's guardian; on the other hand, he couldn't see why the old Zalachenko story should surface. Salander was obviously deranged, so it was no surprise that she had killed these people, but that Zalachenko might have any connection to the affair had not dawned on him. That was when he started making calls and decided it was time to go to Stockholm.

The Section was faced with its worst crisis since the day he had created it.

Zalachenko dragged himself to the toilet. Now that he had crutches, he could move around his room. On Sunday he forced himself through short, sharp training sessions. The pain in his jaw was still excruciating, and he could manage only liquid food, but he could get out of his bed and begin to cover small distances. Having lived so long with a prosthesis, he was used to crutches. He practiced moving noiselessly on them, manoeuvring back and forth around his bed. Every time his right foot touched the floor, a terrible pain shot up his leg.

He gritted his teeth. He thought about the fact that his daughter was very close by. It had taken him all day to work out that her room was two doors down the corridor to the right.

The night nurse had been gone ten minutes; everything was quiet; it was 2:00 in the morning. Zalachenko laboriously got up and fumbled for his crutches. He listened at the door but heard nothing. He pulled open the door and went into the corridor. He heard faint music from the nurses' station. He made his way to the end of the corridor, pushed open the door, and looked into the empty landing where the elevators were. Going back down the corridor, he stopped at the door to his daughter's room and rested there on his crutches for half a minute, listening.

Salander opened her eyes when she heard a scraping sound. It was as though someone was dragging something along the corridor. For a moment there was only silence, and she wondered if she was imagining things. Then she heard the same sound again, moving away. Her uneasiness grew.

Zalachenko was out there somewhere.

She felt fettered to her bed. Her skin itched under the neck brace. She felt an intense desire to move, to get up. Gradually she succeeded in sitting up. That was all she could manage. She sank back onto the pillow.

She ran her hand over her neck brace and located the fastenings that held it in place. She opened them and dropped the brace to the floor. Immediately it was easier to breathe.

What she wanted more than anything was a weapon, and to have the strength to get up and finish the job once and for all.

With difficulty she propped herself up, switched on the night light, and looked around the room. She could see nothing that would serve her purpose. Then her eyes fell on a nurses' table on the wall across from her bed. Someone had left a pencil there.

She waited until the night nurse had come and gone, which tonight she seemed to be doing about every half hour. Presumably the reduced frequency of the nurse's visits meant that the doctors had decided her condition had improved; over the weekend the nurses had checked on her at least once every ten minutes. She could hardly notice any difference herself.

When she was alone she gathered her strength, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She had electrodes taped to her body to record her pulse and breathing, but the wires stretched in the direction of the pencil. She put her weight on her feet and stood up. Suddenly she swayed, off balance. For a second she felt as though she would faint, but she steadied herself against the bed and concentrated her gaze on the table in front of her. She took small, wobbly steps, reached out and grab

bed the pencil.

Then she retreated slowly to the bed. She was exhausted.

After a while she managed to pull the sheet and blanket up to her chin. She studied the pencil. It was a plain wooden pencil, newly sharpened. It would make a passable weapon--for stabbing a face or an eye.

She laid it next to her hip and fell asleep.

CHAPTER 6

Monday, April 11

Blomkvist got up just after 9:00 and called Eriksson at Millennium.

"Good morning, editor in chief," he said.

"I'm still in shock that Erika is gone and you want me to take her place. Her office is empty."

"Then it would probably be a good idea to spend the day moving in there."

"I feel extremely self-conscious."

"Don't be. Everyone agrees that you're the best choice. And if need be, you can always come to me or Christer."

"Thank you for your trust in me."

"You've earned it," Blomkvist said. "Just keep working the way you always do. We'll deal with any problems as and when they crop up."

He told her he was going to be at home all day writing. Eriksson realized that he was reporting in to her the way he had with Berger.

"OK. Is there anything you want us to do?"

"No. On the contrary . . . if you have any instructions for me, just call. I'm still on the Salander story, trying to find out what's happening there, but for everything else to do with the magazine, the ball's in your court. You make the decisions. You'll have my support if you need it."

"And what if I make a wrong decision?"

"If I see or hear anything out of the ordinary, we'll talk it through. But it would have to be something very unusual. Generally there aren't any decisions that are 100 percent right or wrong. You'll make your decisions, and they might not be the same ones Erika would have made or even that I would have made. But your decisions are the ones that count."