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

She was not going to accept a situation like that.

The last time she had been locked up she was barely into her teens. She was grown up now, and had more knowledge and skills. She wondered how long it would take for her to escape and settle down safely in some other country to create a new identity and a new life for herself.

She got up from the bed and went to the bathroom, where she looked in the mirror. She was no longer limping. She ran her fingers over her hip where the wound had healed to a scar. She twisted her arms and stretched her left shoulder back and forth. It was tight, but she was more or less healed. She tapped herself on the head. She supposed that her brain had not been too greatly damaged after being perforated by a bullet with a full-metal jacket.

She had been extraordinarily lucky.

Until she had access to a computer, she had spent her time trying to work out how to escape from this locked room at Sahlgrenska.

Then Dr. Jonasson and Blomkvist had upset her plans by smuggling in her Palm. She had read Blomkvist's articles and brooded over what he had to say. She had done a risk assessment and pondered his plan, weighing her chances. She had decided that for once she was going to do as he advised. She would test the system. Blomkvist had convinced her that she had nothing to lose, and he was offering her a chance to escape in a very different way. If the plan failed, she would simply have to plot her escape from St. Stefan's or whichever other nuthouse they put her in.

What actually convinced her to decide to play the game Blomkvist's way was her desire for revenge.

She forgave nothing.

Zalachenko, Bjorck, and Bjurman were dead.

Teleborian, on the other hand, was alive.

So too was her brother, the so-called Ronald Niedermann, even though in reality he was not her problem. Certainly, he had helped in the attempt to murder and bury her, but he seemed peripheral. If I run into him sometime, we'll see, but until such time, he's the police's problem.

Yet Blomkvist was right: behind the conspiracy there had to be others not known to her who had contributed to the shaping of her life. She had to put names and social security numbers to these people.

So she had decided to go along with Blomkvist's plan. That was why she had written the plain, unvarnished truth about her life in a cracklingly terse autobiography of forty pages. She had been quite precise. Everything she had written was true. She had accepted Blomkvist's reasoning that she had already been so savaged in the Swedish media by such grotesque libels that a little sheer nonsense could not possibly further damage her reputation.

The autobiography was a fiction in the sense that she had not, of course, told the whole truth. She had no intention of doing that.

She went back to bed and pulled the covers over her.

She felt a niggling irritation that she could not identify. She reached for a notebook, given to her by Giannini and hardly used. She turned to the first page, where she had written: (x3 + y3 = z3)

She had spent several weeks in the Caribbean last winter working herself into a frenzy over Fermat's Last Theorem. When she came back to Sweden, before she got mixed up in the hunt for Zalachenko, she had kept on playing with the equations. What was maddening was that she had the feeling she had seen a solution . . . that she had discovered a solution.

But she could not remember what it was.

Not being able to remember something was a phenomenon unknown to Salander. She had tested herself by going on the Net and picking out random HTML codes that she glanced at, memorized, and reproduced exactly.

She had not lost her photographic memory, which she had always considered a curse.

Everything was running as usual in her head.

Save for the fact that she thought she recalled seeing a solution to Fermat's theorem, but she could not remember how, when, or where.

The worst thing was that she did not have the least interest in it. Fermat's theorem no longer fascinated her. That was ominous. That was just the way she usually functioned. She would be fascinated by a problem, but as soon as she had solved it, she lost interest.

That was how she felt about Fermat. He was no longer a demon riding on her shoulder, demanding her attention and vexing her intellect. It was an ordinary formula, some squiggles on a piece of paper, and she felt no desire at all to engage with it.

This bothered her. She put down the notebook.

She should get some sleep.

Instead she took out her Palm again and went on the Net. She thought for a moment and then went into Armansky's hard drive, which she had not done since she got the hand-held. Armansky was working with Blomkvist, but she had not had any particular need to read what he was up to.

Absentmindedly she read his email.

She found the assessment Rosin had carried out of Berger's house. She could scarcely believe what she was reading. Erika Berger has a stalker.

She found a message from Susanne Linder, who had evidently stayed at Berger's house the night before and who had emailed a report late that night. She looked at the time of the message. It had been sent just before 3:00 in the morning and reported Berger's discovery that diaries, letters and photographs, along with a video of a personal nature, had been stolen from a chest of drawers in Berger's bedroom.

After discussing the matter, Fru Berger and I determined that the theft must have occurred during the time she was at Nacka hospital. That left a period of c. 2.5 hours when the house was empty, and the defective alarm from NIP was not switched on. At all other times either Berger or David was in the house until the theft was discovered.

Conclusion: Berger's stalker remained in her area and was able to observe that she was picked up by a taxi, also possibly that she was injured. The stalker then took the opportunity to get into the house.

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Salander updated her download of Armansky's hard drive and then switched off the Palm, lost in thought. She had mixed feelings.

She had no reason to love Berger. She remembered still the humiliation she had felt when she saw her walk off down Hornsgatan with Blomkvist the day before New Year's Eve a year and a half ago.

It had been the stupidest moment of her life and she would never again allow herself those sorts of feelings.

She remembered the terrible hatred she had felt, and her desire to run after them and hurt Berger.

Embarrassing.

She was cured.

But she had no reason to sympathize with Berger.

She wondered what the video "of a personal nature" contained. She had her own film of a personal nature, which showed how Advokat Bastard Bjurman had raped her. And it was now in Blomkvist's keeping. She wondered how she would have reacted if someone had broken into her place and stolen the DVD. Which Blomkvist by definition had actually done, even though his motives were not to harm her.

Hmm. An awkward situation.

Berger had not been able to sleep on Thursday night. She hobbled restlessly back and forth while Linder kept a watchful eye on her. Her anxiety lay like a heavy fog over the house.

At 2:30 Linder managed to talk Berger into getting into bed to rest, even if she did not sleep. She heaved a sigh of relief when Berger closed her bedroom door. She opened her laptop and summarized the situation in an email to Armansky. She had scarcely sent the message before she heard that Berger was up and moving about again.

At 7:30 she made Berger call SMP and take a sick day. Berger had reluctantly agreed and then fallen asleep on the living-room sofa in front of the boarded-up picture window. Linder spread a blanket over her. Then she made some coffee and called Armansky, explaining her presence at the house and that she had been called in by Rosin.

"Stay there with Berger," Armansky told her, "and get a couple of hours' sleep yourself."

"I don't know how we're going to bill this--"

"We'll work that out later."

Berger slept until 2:30. She woke up to find Linder sleeping in a recliner on the other side of the living room.

&n

bsp; Figuerola slept late on Friday morning; she did not have time for her morning run. She blamed Blomkvist for this state of affairs as she showered and then rousted him out of bed.

Blomkvist drove to Millennium, where everyone was surprised to see him up so early. He mumbled something, made some coffee, and called Eriksson and Cortez into his office. They spent three hours going over the articles for the themed issue and keeping track of the book's progress.

"Dag's book went to the printer yesterday," Eriksson said. "We're going down the perfect-bound trade paperback route."

"The special issue is going to be called 'The Lisbeth Salander Story,'" Cortez said. "They're bound to move the date of the trial, but at the moment it's set for Wednesday, July 13. The magazine will be printed by then, but we haven't fixed on a distribution date yet. You can decide nearer the time."

"Good. That leaves the Zalachenko book, which right now is a nightmare. I'm calling it The Section. The first half is basically what's in the magazine. It begins with the murders of Dag and Mia, and then follows the hunt for Salander first, then Zalachenko, and then Niedermann. The second half will be everything we know about the Section."

"Mikael, even if the printer breaks every record for us, we're going to have to send them the files by the end of this month--at the latest," Eriksson said. "Christer will need a couple of days for the layout, the typesetter, say, a week. So we have about two weeks left for the text. I don't know how we're going to make it."

"We won't have time to dig up the whole story," Blomkvist conceded. "But I don't think we could manage that even if we had a whole year. What we're going to do in this book is to state what happened. If we don't have a source for something, then I'll say so. If we're flying kites, we'll make that clear. So, we're going to write about what happened, what we can document, and what we believe to have happened."

"That's pretty vague," Cortez said.

Blomkvist shook his head. "If I say that a Sapo agent broke into my apartment and I can document it--and him--with a video, then it's documented. If I say that he did it on behalf of the Section, then that's speculation, but in the light of all the facts we're setting out, it's a reasonable speculation. Does that make sense?"

"It does."

"I won't have time to write all the missing pieces myself. I have a list of articles here that you, Henry, will have to cobble together. It corresponds to about fifty pages of book text. Malin, you're backup for Henry, just as when we were editing Dag's book. All three of our names will be on the cover and on the title page. Is that all right with you two?"

"That's fine," Eriksson said. "But we have other urgent problems."

"Such as?"