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

"There was one thing that struck me," Figuerola said.

"What's that?"

"Evert Gullberg. He did his military service in the forties and became a tax attorney, and then in the fifties he vanished into thin air."

"And?"

"When we were discussing this yesterday, we talked about him as if he were some sort of hired killer."

"It sounds far-fetched, I know, but--"

"It struck me that there is so little background on him it seems almost like a smokescreen. Both IB and SIS established cover companies outside the building in the fifties and sixties."

"I was wondering when you'd think of that," Edklinth said.

"I'd like permission to go through the personnel files from the fifties," Figuerola said.

"No," Edklinth said, shaking his head. "We can't go into the archives without authorization from the chief of Secretariat, and we don't want to attract attention until we have more to go on."

"So what next?"

"Martensson," Edklinth said. "Find out what he's working on."

Salander was studying the vent window in her room when she heard the key turn in the door. In came Jonasson. It was past 10:00 on Tuesday night. He had interrupted her planning how to break out of Sahlgrenska hospital.

She had measured the window and discovered that her head would fit through it and that she would not have much problem squeezing the rest of her body through. It was three storeys to the ground, but a combination of torn sheets and a ten-foot extension cord from a floor lamp would solve that problem.

She had plotted her escape step by step. The problem was what she would wear. She had underwear, a hospital nightshirt, and a pair of plastic flip-flops that she had managed to borrow. She had 200 kronor in cash from Annika Giannini to pay for sweets from the hospital snack shop. That should be enough for a cheap pair of jeans and a T-shirt at the Salvation Army store, if she could find one in Goteborg. She would have to spend what was left of the money on a call to Plague, a fellow member of Hacker Republic. Then everything would work out. She planned on landing in Gibraltar a few days after she escaped, and from there she would create a new identity somewhere in the world.

Jonasson sat in the guest chair. She sat on the edge of her bed.

"Hello, Lisbeth. I'm sorry I haven't come to see you the past few days, but I've been up to my ears in the ER, and I've also been made a mentor for a couple of interns."

She hadn't expected Jonasson to make special visits to see her.

He picked up her chart and studied her temperature graph and the record of medications. Her temperature was steady, between 98.6 and 98.9 degrees, and for the past week she had not taken any headache tablets.

"Dr. Endrin is your doctor. Do you get along with her?"

"She's all right," Salander said without enthusiasm.

"Is it OK if I do an examination?"

She nodded. He took a penlight out of his pocket and bent over to shine it into her eyes, to see how her pupils contracted and expanded. He asked her to open her mouth and examined her throat. Then he placed his hands gently around her neck and moved her head back and forth and to the sides a few times.

"You don't have any pain in your neck?" he said.

She shook her head.

"How's the headache?"

"I feel it now and then, but it passes."

"The healing process is ongoing. The headache will eventually disappear altogether."

Her hair was still so short that he hardly needed to push aside the tufts to feel the scar above her ear. It was healing, but there was a small scab.

"You've been scratching the wound. You shouldn't do that."

She nodded. He took her left elbow and raised the arm.

"Can you lift it by yourself?"

She lifted her arm.

"Do you have any pain or discomfort in the shoulder?"

She shook her head.

"Does it feel tight?"

"A little."

"I think you have to do a bit more physical therapy on your shoulder muscles."

"It's hard when you're locked up like this."

He smiled at her. "That won't last. Are you doing the exercises the therapist recommended?"

She nodded.

He pressed his stethoscope against his wrist for a moment to warm it. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and untied the strings of her nightshirt, listened to her heart, and took her pulse. He asked her to lean forward and placed the stethoscope on her back to listen to her lungs.

"Cough."

She coughed.

"OK, you can do up your nightshirt and get into bed. From a medical standpoint, you're just about recovered."

She expected him to get up and say he would come back in a few days, but he stayed, sitting on the bed. He seemed to be thinking about something. Salander waited patiently.

"Do you know why I became a doctor?" he said.

She shook her head.

"I come from a working-class family. I always thought I wanted to be a doctor. I'd actually thought about becoming a psychiatrist when I was a teenager. I was terribly intellectual."

Salander looked at him with sudden alertness as soon as he mentioned the word psychiatrist.

"But I wasn't sure I could handle the studies. So when I finished school I studied to be a welder and I even worked as one for several years. I thought it was a good idea to have something to fall back on if the medical studies didn't work out. And being a welder wasn't so different from being a doctor. It's all about patching things up. Now I'm working here at Sahlgrenska and patching up people like you."

She wondered if he was pulling her leg.

"Lisbeth, I'm wondering . . ."

He then said nothing for such a long time that Salander almost asked what he wanted. But she waited for him to speak.

"Would you be angry if I asked you a personal question? I want to ask you as a private individual, not as a doctor. I won't make any record of your answer, and I won't discuss it with anyone else. And you don't have to answer if you don't want to."

"What is it?"

"Since you were shut up at St. Stefan's when you were twelve, you've refused to respond when any psychiatrist has tried to talk to you. Why is that?"

Salander's eyes darkened, but they were utterly expressionless as she looked at Jonasson. She sat in silence for two minutes.

"Why do you want to know?" she said at last.

"To be honest, I'm not really sure. I think I'm trying to understand something."

Her lips curled a little. "I don't talk to crazy-doctors because they never listen to what I have to say."

Jonasson laughed. "OK. Tell me . . . what do you think of Peter Teleborian?"

Jonasson threw out the name so unexpectedly that Salander almost jumped. Her eyes narrowed.

"What the hell is this, Twenty Questions? What are you after?" Her voice sounded like sandpaper.

Jonasson leaned forward, almost too close.

"Because a--what did you call it--a crazy-doctor by the name of Peter Teleborian, who's somewhat renowned in my profession, has been to see me twice in the past few days, trying to convince me to let him examine you."

Salander felt an icy chill run down her spine.

"The district court is going to appoint him to do a forensic psychiatric assessment of you."

"And?"

"I don't like the man. I've told him he can't see you. Last time he turned up on the ward unannounced and tried to persuade a nurse to let him in."