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

"It would help if you'd tell me what's going on."

"I'll get back to you."

They sat in silence around the conference table for a moment.

"So," Edklinth said at last. "Teleborian meets with the Section and then goes directly to see Prosecutor Ekstrom. I'd give a lot of money to find out what they talked about."

"Or you could just ask me," Blomkvist said.

Edklinth and Figuerola looked at him.

"They met to finalize their strategy for nailing Salander at her trial."

Figuerola gave him a look. Then she nodded slowly.

"That's a guess," Edklinth said. "Unless you happen to have paranormal abilities."

"It's no guess," said Mikael. "They met to discuss the forensic psychiatric report on Salander. Teleborian has just finished writing it."

"Nonsense. Salander hasn't even been examined."

Blomkvist shrugged and opened his laptop case. "That hasn't stopped Teleborian in the past. Here's the latest version. It's dated, as you can see, the week the trial is scheduled to begin."

Edklinth and Figuerola read through the report before them. At last they exchanged glances and then looked at Blomkvist.

"And where the devil did you get ahold of this?" Edklinth said.

"From a source I have to protect," said Blomkvist.

"Blomkvist, we have to be able to trust each other. You're withholding information. Do you have any more surprises up your sleeve?"

"Yes. I do have secrets, of course. Just as I'm persuaded that you haven't given me carte blanche to look at everything you have here at Sapo."

"It's not the same thing."

"It's precisely the same thing. This arrangement involves cooperation. You said it yourself: we have to trust each other. I'm not holding back anything that could be useful to your investigation of the Section or could throw light on the various crimes that have been committed. I've already handed over evidence that Teleborian committed crimes with Bjorck in 1991, and I told you that he would be hired to do the same thing again now. And this is the document that proves me right."

"But you're still withholding key material."

"Naturally, and you can either suspend our cooperation or you can live with that."

Figuerola held up a diplomatic finger. "Excuse me, but does this mean that Ekstrom is working for the Section?"

Blomkvist frowned. "That I don't know. My sense is that he's more a useful fool being used by the Section. He's ambitious, but I think he's honest, if a little stupid. One source did tell me that he swallowed most of what Teleborian fed him about Salander at a presentation of reports when the hunt for her was still on."

"So you don't think it takes much to manipulate him?"

"Exactly. And Criminal Inspector Faste is an unadulterated idiot who believes that Salander is a lesbian Satanist."

Berger was at home. She felt paralysed and unable to concentrate on any real work. All the time she expected someone to call and tell her that pictures of her were posted on some website.

She caught herself thinking over and over about Salander, although she realized that her hopes of getting help from her were most likely in vain. Salander was locked up at Sahlgrenska. She was not allowed visitors and could not even read the newspapers. But she was an oddly resourceful young woman. Despite her isolation she had managed to contact Berger on ICQ and then by phone. And two years ago she had single-handedly destroyed Wennerstrom's financial empire and saved Millennium.

At 8:00 Linder arrived and knocked on the door. Berger jumped as though someone had fired a shot in her living room.

"Hello, Erika. You're sitting here in the dark looking glum."

Berger nodded and turned on a light. "Hi. I'll put on some coffee--"

"No. Let me do it. Anything new?"

You can say that again. Lisbeth Salander got in touch with me and took control of my computer. And then she called to say that Teleborian and somebody named Jonas were meeting at Central Station this afternoon.

"No. Nothing new," she said. "But I have something I'd like to bounce off you."

"Go ahead."

"What do you think the chances are that this isn't a stalker but somebody I know who wants to fuck with me?"

"What's the difference?"

"To me a stalker is someone I don't know who's become fixated on me. The alternative is a person who wants to take some sort of revenge and sabotage my life for personal reasons."

"Interesting thought. Why did this come up?"

"I was . . . discussing the situation with someone today. I can't give you her name, but she suggested that threats from a real stalker would be different. She said a stalker would never have written the email to the girl on the culture desk. It seems completely beside the point."

Linder said: "There is something to that. You know, I never read the emails. Could I see them?"

Berger set up her laptop on the kitchen table.

Figuerola escorted Blomkvist out of police headquarters at 10:00 p.m. They stopped at the same place in Kronoberg park as the day before.

"Here we are again. Are you going to disappear to work or do you want to come to my place and come to bed with me?"

"Well . . ."

"You don't have to feel pressured, Mikael. If you have to work, then do it."

"Listen, Figuerola, you're worryingly habit-forming."

"And you don't want to be dependent on anything. Is that what you're saying?"

"No. That's not what I'm saying. But there's someone I have to talk to tonight and it'll take a while. You'll be asleep before I'm done."

She shrugged.

"See you."

He kissed her cheek and headed for the bus stop on Fridhemsplan.

"Blomkvist," she called.

"What?"

"I'm free tomorrow morning as well. Come and have breakfast if you can."

CHAPTER 21

Saturday, June 4-Monday, June 6

Salander picked up a number of ominous vibrations as she browsed the emails of the news editor, Holm. He was fifty-eight and thus fell outside the group, but Salander had included him anyway because he and Berger had been at each other's throats. He was a schemer who wrote messages to various people telling them how someone had done a rotten job.

It was obvious to Salander that Holm did not like Berger, and he certainly wasted a lot of space talking about how "the bitch" had said this or done that. He used the Net exclusively for work-related sites. If he had other interests, he must Google them in his own time on some other machine.

She kept him as a candidate for the title of Poison Pen, but he was not a favourite. Salan

der spent some time thinking about why she did not believe he was the one, and arrived at the conclusion that he was so damned arrogant he did not have to go to the trouble of using anonymous email. If he wanted to call Berger a whore, he would do it openly. And he did not seem the type to go sneaking into Berger's home in the middle of the night.

At 10:00 in the evening she took a break and went into [Idiotic_Table]. She saw that Blomkvist had not come back yet. She felt slightly peeved and wondered what he was up to, and whether he had made it in time to Teleborian's meeting.

Then she went back into SMP's server.

She moved to the next name on the list, assistant sports editor Claes Lundin, twenty-nine. She had just opened his email when she stopped and bit her lip. She closed it again and went instead to Berger's.

She scrolled back in time. There was relatively little in Berger's in-box, since her email account had only been opened on May 2. The very first message was a midday memo from Peter Fredriksson. In the course of Berger's first day several people had emailed her to welcome her to SMP.

Salander carefully read each message in Berger's in-box. She could see how even from day one there had been a hostile undertone in her correspondence with Holm. They seemed unable to agree on anything, and Salander saw that Holm was already trying to exasperate Berger by sending several emails about complete trivialities.

She skipped over ads, spam, and news memos. She focused on any kind of personal correspondence. She read budget calculations, advertising and marketing projections, an exchange with CFO Sellberg that went on for a week and was virtually a brawl over staff layoffs. Berger had received irritated messages from the head of the legal department about some temp by the name of Johannes Frisk. She had apparently assigned him to work on some story and this had not been appreciated. It seemed as if no-one at management level could see anything positive in any of Berger's arguments or proposals.

After a while Salander scrolled back to the beginning and did a statistical calculation in her head. Of all the upper-level managers at SMP, only four did not engage in sniping. They were CEO Magnus Borgsjo, assistant editor Fredriksson, assistant front-page editor Magnusson, and culture editor Sebastian Strandlund.

Had they never heard of women at SMP? All the heads of department were men.