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

The Salander investigation is fake. Bjorck's original doesn't match Blomkvist's version. Classify Top Secret.

Then a series of notes claiming that Salander was paranoid and a schizophrenic.

Correct to lock up Salander 1991.

He found what linked the investigations in the Salander slush, that is, the supplementary information that the prosecutor considered irrelevant to the preliminary investigation, and which would therefore not be presented at the trial or make up part of the chain of evidence against her. This included almost everything that had to do with Zalachenko's background.

The investigation was totally inadequate.

Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence and to what extent it was contrived. Where was the boundary? And was Ekstrom aware that there was a boundary?

Could it be that someone was deliberately supplying Ekstrom with believable but misleading information?

Finally Blomkvist logged into Hotmail and spent ten minutes checking the half-dozen anonymous email accounts he had created. Each day he had checked the address he had given to Criminal Inspector Modig. He had no great hope that she would contact him, so he was mildly surprised when he opened the in-box and found an email from . The message consisted of a single line:

Cafe Madeleine, upper level, 11:00 a.m. Saturday.

Plague pinged Salander at midnight and interrupted her in the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time with Holger Palmgren as her guardian. She cast an irritated glance at the display.

She sat up in bed and looked eagerly at the screen of her Palm.

Plague gave her the URL of the server where he kept Teleborian's hard drive.

Salander disconnected from Plague and accessed the server he had directed her to. She spent nearly three hours scrutinizing folder after folder on Teleborian's computer.

She found correspondence between Teleborian and a person with a Hotmail address who sent encrypted email. Since she had access to Teleborian's PGP key, she easily decoded the correspondence. His name was Jonas, no last name. Jonas and Teleborian had an unhealthy interest in seeing that Salander did not thrive.

Yes, we can prove that there is a conspiracy.

But what really interested Salander were the forty-seven folders containing close to 9,000 photographs of explicit child pornography. She clicked on image after image of children aged about fifteen or younger. A number of pictures were of infants. The majority were of girls. Many of them were sadistic.

She found links to at least a dozen people abroad who traded child porn with one another.

Salander bit her lip, but her face was otherwise expressionless.

She remembered the nights when, as a twelve-year-old, she had been strapped down in a stimulus-free room at St. Stefan's. Teleborian had come into the room again and again to look at her in the glow of the night light.

She knew. He had never touched her, but she had always known.

She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.

After a while she pinged Blomkvist on ICQ.

Blomkvist spent the night at Salander's apartment on Fiskargatan. He did not shut down the computer until 6:30 a.m. and fell asleep with photographs of gross child pornography whirling through his mind. He woke at 10:15 and rolled out of Salander's bed, showered, and called a taxi to pick him up outside Sodra theatre. He got out at Birger Jarlsgatan at 10:55 and walked to Cafe Madeleine.

Modig was waiting for him with a cup of black coffee in front of her.

"Hi," Blomkvist said.

"I'm taking a big risk here," she said without greeting.

"Nobody will hear of ou

r meeting from me."

She seemed stressed.

"One of my colleagues recently went to see former prime minister Falldin. He went there on his own initiative, and his job is on the line now too."

"I understand."

"I need a guarantee of anonymity for both of us."

"I don't even know which colleague you're talking about."

"I'll tell you later. I want you to promise to give him protection as a source."

"You have my word."

She looked at her watch.

"Are you in a hurry?"

"Yes. I have to meet my husband and kids at the Sturegallerian in ten minutes. He thinks I'm still at work."

"And Bublanski knows nothing about this?"

"No."

"Right. You and your colleague are sources and you have complete source protection. Both of you. As long as you live."

"My colleague is Jerker Holmberg. You met him down in Goteborg. His father is a Centre Party member, and Jerker has known Prime Minister Falldin since he was a child. He seems to be pleasant enough. So Jerker went to see him and asked about Zalachenko."

Blomkvist's heart began to pound.

"Jerker asked Falldin what he knew about the defection, but Falldin didn't reply. When Holmberg told him that we suspect Salander was locked up by the people who were protecting Zalachenko, well, that really upset him."

"Did he say how much he knew?"

"Falldin told him that the chief of Sapo at the time and a colleague came to visit him very soon after he became prime minister. They told a fantastic story about a Russian defector who had come to Sweden, told him that it was the most sensitive military secret Sweden possessed, that there was nothing in Swedish military intelligence that was anywhere near as important. Falldin said he didn't know how to handle it, that there was no-one with much experience in government, the Social Democrats having been in power for more than forty years. He was advised that he alone had to make the decisions, and that if he discussed it with his government colleagues then Sapo would wash their hands of it. He remembered the whole thing as being very unpleasant."

"What did he do?"

"He realized he had no choice but to do what the gentlemen from Sapo proposed. He issued a directive putting Sapo in sole charge of the defector. He pledged never to discuss the matter with anyone. Falldin was never ever told Zalachenko's name."