The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest m(-3 Read online

  When Blomkvist checked his mobile, he saw that he had forty-two messages and texts, almost all of them from journalists. There had been wild speculation in the media after it was revealed that Blomkvist was the one who had found Salander, and had probably saved her life. He was obviously closely connected with the development of events.

  He deleted all the messages from reporters and called his sister, Annika, to invite himself for Sunday lunch. Then he called Dragan Armansky, C.E.O. of Milton Security, who was at his home in Lidingö.

  “You certainly have a way with headlines,” Armansky said.

  “I tried to reach you earlier this week. I got a message that you were looking for me, but I just didn’t have time –”

  “We’ve been doing our own investigation at Milton. And I understood from Holger Palmgren that you had some information. But it seems you were far ahead of us.”

  Blomkvist hesitated before he said: “Can I trust you?”

  “How do you mean exactly?”

  “Are you on Salander’s side or not? Can I believe that you want the best for her?”

  “I’m her friend. Although, as you know, that’s not necessarily the same thing as saying that she’s my friend.”

  “I understand that. But what I’m asking is whether or not you’re willing to put yourself in her corner and get into a pitched battle with her enemies.”

  “I’m on her side,” he said.

  “Can I share information with you and discuss things with you without the risk of your leaking it to the police or to anyone else?”

  “I can’t get involved in criminal activity,” Armansky said.

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “You can absolutely rely on me as long as you don’t reveal that you’re engaged in any sort of criminal activity.”

  “Good enough. We need to meet.”

  “I’m coming into the city this evening. Dinner?”

  “I don’t have time today, but I’d be grateful if we could meet tomorrow night. You and I and perhaps a few other people might need to sit down for a chat.”

  “You’re welcome at Milton. Shall we say 6.00?”

  “One more thing… I’m seeing my sister, the lawyer Annika Giannini, later this morning. She’s considering taking on Salander as a client, but she can’t work for nothing. I can pay part of her fee out of my own pocket. Would Milton Security be willing to contribute?”

  “That girl is going to need a damned good criminal lawyer. Your sister might not be the best choice, if you’ll forgive me for saying so. I’ve already talked to Milton’s chief lawyer and he’s looking into it. I was thinking of Peter Althin or someone like that.”

  “That would be a mistake. Salander needs a totally different kind of legal support. You’ll see what I mean when we talk. But would you be willing, in principle, to help?”

  “I’d already decided that Milton ought to hire a lawyer for her –”

  “Is that a yes or a no? I know what happened to her. I know roughly what’s behind it all. And I have a strategy.”

  Armansky laughed.

  “O.K. I’ll listen to what you have to say. If I like it, I’m in.”

  Blomkvist kissed his sister on the cheek and immediately asked: “Are you going to be representing Lisbeth Salander?”

  “I’m going to have to say no. You know I’m not a criminal lawyer. Even if she’s acquitted of murder, there’s going to be a rack of other charges. She’s going to need someone with a completely different sort of clout and experience than I have.”

  “You’re wrong. You’re a lawyer and you’re a recognized authority in women’s rights. In my considered view you’re precisely the lawyer she needs.”

  “Mikael… I don’t think you really appreciate what this involves. It’s a complex criminal case, not a straightforward case of sexual harassment or of violence against a woman. If I take on her defence, it could turn out to be a disaster.”

  Blomkvist smiled. “You’re missing the point. If she had been charged with the murders of Dag and Mia, for example, I would have gone for the Silbersky type or another of the heavy-duty criminal lawyers. But this trial is going to be about entirely different things.”

  “I think you’d better explain.”

  They talked for almost two hours over sandwiches and coffee. By the time Mikael had finished his account, Annika had been persuaded. Mikael picked up his mobile and made another call to Inspector Erlander in Göteborg.

  “Hello, it’s Blomkvist again.”

  “I don’t have any news on Salander,” Erlander said, plainly irritated.

  “Which I assume is good news. But I actually have some news.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, she now has a lawyer named Annika Giannini. She’s with me right now, so I’ll put her on.”

  Blomkvist handed the mobile across the table.

  “My name is Annika Giannini and I’ve been taken on to represent Lisbeth Salander. I need to get in touch with my client so that she can approve me as her defence lawyer. And I need the telephone number of the prosecutor.”

  “As far as I know,” Erlander said, “a public defence has already been appointed.”

  “That’s nice to hear. Did anyone ask Lisbeth Salander her opinion?”

  “Quite frankly… we haven’t had the opportunity to speak with her yet. We hope to be able to do so tomorrow, if she’s well enough.”

  “Fine. Then I’ll tell you here and now that until Fröken Salander says otherwise, you may regard me as her legal representative. You may not question her unless I am present. You can say hello to her and ask her whether she accepts me as her lawyer or not. But that is all. Is that understood?”

  “Yes,” Erlander said with an audible sigh. He was not entirely sure what the letter of the law was on this point. “Our number one objective is to discover if she has any information as to where Ronald Niedermann might be. Is it O.K. to ask her about that… even if you’re not present?”

  “That’s fine… you may ask her questions relating to the police hunt for Niedermann. But you may not ask her any questions relating to any possible charges against her. Agreed?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  Inspector Erlander got up from his desk and went upstairs to tell the preliminary investigation leader, Agneta Jervas, about his conversation with Giannini.

  “She was obviously hired by Blomkvist. I can’t believe Salander knows anything about it.”

  “Giannini works in women’s rights. I heard her lecture once. She’s sharp, but completely unsuitable for this case.”

  “It’s up to Salander to decide.”

  “I might have to contest the decision in court… For the girl’s own sake she has to have a proper defence, and not some celebrity chasing headlines. Hmm. Salander has also been declared legally incompetent. I don’t know whether that affects things.”

  “What should we do?”

  Jervas thought for a moment. “This is a complete mess. I don’t know who’s going to be in charge of this case or if it’ll be transferred to Ekström in Stockholm. In any event she has to have a lawyer. O.K… ask her if she wants Giannini.”

  When Blomkvist reached home at 5.00 in the afternoon he turned on his iBook and took up the thread of the text he had begun writing at the hotel in Göteborg. When he had worked for seven straight hours, he had identified the most glaring holes in the story. There was still much research to be done. One question he could not answer – based on the existing documentation – was who in Säpo, apart from Gunnar Björck, had conspired to lock Salander away in the asylum. Nor had he got to the heart of the relationship between Björck and the psychiatrist Peter Teleborian.

  Finally he shut down the computer and went to bed. He felt as soon as he lay down that for the first time in weeks he could relax and sleep peacefully. The story was under control. No matter how many questions remained unanswered, he already had enough material to set off a landslide of headlines.

  Late as it
was, he picked up the telephone to call Berger and update her. And then he remembered that she had left Millennium. Suddenly he found it difficult to sleep.

  A man carrying a brown briefcase stepped carefully down from the 7.30 p.m. train at Stockholm Central Station. He stood for a moment in the sea of travellers, getting his bearings. He had started out from Laholm just after 8.00 in the morning. He stopped in Göteborg to have lunch with an old friend before resuming his journey to Stockholm. He had not been to Stockholm for two years. In fact he had not planned to visit the capital ever again. Even though he had lived there for large parts of his working life, he always felt a little out of place in Stockholm, a feeling that had grown stronger with every visit he made since his retirement.

  He walked slowly through the station, bought the evening papers and two bananas at Pressbyrån, and paused to watch two Muslim women in veils hurry past him. He had nothing against women in veils. It was nothing to him if people wanted to dress up in costume. But he was bothered by the fact that they had to dress like that in the middle of Stockholm. In his opinion, Somalia was a much better place for that sort of attire.

  He walked the three hundred metres to Frey’s Hotel next to the old post office on Vasagatan. That was where he had stayed on previous visits. The hotel was centrally located and clean. And it was inexpensive, which was a factor since he was paying for the journey himself. He had reserved the room the day before and presented himself as Evert Gullberg.

  When he got up to the room he went straight to the bathroom. He had reached the age when he had to use the toilet rather often. It was several years since he had slept through a whole night.

  When he had finished he took off his hat, a narrow-brimmed, dark-green English felt hat, and loosened his tie. He was one metre eighty-four tall and weighed sixty-eight kilos, which meant he was thin and wiry. He wore a hound’s-tooth jacket and dark-grey trousers. He opened the brown briefcase and unpacked two shirts, a second tie, and underwear, which he arranged in the chest of drawers. Then he hung his overcoat and jacket in the wardrobe behind the door.

  It was too early to go to bed. It was too late to bother going for an evening walk, something he might not enjoy in any case. He sat down in the obligatory chair in the hotel room and looked around. He switched on the T.V. and turned down the volume so that he would not have to hear it. He thought about calling reception and ordering coffee, but decided it was too late. Instead he opened the mini-bar and poured a miniature of Johnny Walker into a glass, and added very little water. He opened the evening papers and read everything that had been written that day about the search for Ronald Niedermann and the case of Lisbeth Salander. After a while he took out a leather-bound notebook and made some notes.

  Gullberg, formerly Senior Administrative Officer at the Security Police, was now seventy-eight years old and had been retired for thirteen years. But intelligence officers never really retire, they just slip into the shadows.

  After the war, when Gullberg was nineteen years old, he had joined the navy. He did his military service first as an officer cadet and was then accepted for officer training. But instead of the usual assignment at sea that he had anticipated, he was sent to Karlskrona as a signal tracker in the navy’s intelligence service. He had no difficulty with the work, which was mostly figuring out what was going on on the other side of the Baltic. But he found it dull and uninteresting. Through the service’s language school, however, he did learn Russian and Polish. These linguistic skills were one of the reasons he was recruited by the Security Police in 1950, during the time when the impeccably mannered Georg Thulin was head of the third division of Säpo. When he started, the total budget of the secret police was 2.7 million kronor for a staff of ninety-six people. When Gullberg formally retired in 1992, the budget of the Security Police was in excess of 350 million kronor, and he had no idea how many employees the Firm had.

  Gullberg had spent his life on his majesty’s secret service, or perhaps more accurately in the secret service of the social-democratic welfare state. Which was an irony, since he had faithfully voted for the moderates in one election after another, except for 1991 when he deliberately voted against the moderates because he believed that Carl Bildt was a realpolitik catastrophe. He had voted instead for Ingvar Carlsson. The years of “Sweden’s best government” had also confirmed his worst fears. The moderate government had come to power when the Soviet Union was collapsing, and in his opinion no government had been less prepared to meet the new political opportunities emerging in the East, or to make use of the art of espionage. On the contrary, the Bildt government had cut back the Soviet desk for financial reasons and had at the same time got themselves involved in the international mess in Bosnia and Serbia – as if Serbia could ever threaten Sweden. The result was that a fabulous opportunity to plant long-term informants in Moscow had been lost. Some day, when relations would once again worsen – which according to Gullberg was inevitable – absurd demands would be made on the Security Police and the military intelligence service; they would be expected to wave their magic wand and summon up well-placed agents out of a bottle.

  Gullberg had begun at the Russia desk of the third division of the state police, and after two years in the job had undertaken his first tentative field work in 1952 and 1953 as an Air Force attaché with the rank of captain at the embassy in Moscow. Strangely enough, he was following in the footsteps of another well-known spy. Some years earlier that post had been occupied by the notorious Colonel Wennerström.[1]

  Back in Sweden, Gullberg had worked in Counter-Espionage, and ten years later he was one of the younger security police officers who, working under Otto Danielsson, exposed Wennerström and eventually got him a life sentence for treason at Långholmen prison.

  When the Security Police was reorganized under Per Gunnar Vinge in 1964 and became the Security Division of the National Police Board, or Swedish Internal Security – S.I.S. – the major increase in personnel began. By then Gullberg had worked at the Security Police for fourteen years, and had become one of its trusted veterans.

  Gullberg had never used the designation “Säpo” for Säkerhetspolisen, the Security Police. He used the term “S.I.S.” in official contexts, and among colleagues he would also refer to “the Company” or “the Firm,” or merely “the Division” – but never “Säpo”. The reason was simple. The Firm’s most important task for many years was so-called personnel control, that is, the investigation and registration of Swedish citizens who might be suspected of harbouring communist or subversive views. Within the Firm the terms communist and traitor were synonymous. The later conventional use of the term “Säpo” was actually something that the potentially subversive communist publication Clarté had coined as a pejorative name for the communist-hunters within the police force. For the life of him Gullberg could never imagine why his former boss P.G. Vinge had entitled his memoirs Säpo Chief 1962–1970.

  It was the reorganization of 1964 that had shaped Gullberg’s future career.

  The designation S.I.S. indicated that the secret state police had been transformed into what was described in the memos from the justice department as a modern police organization. This involved recruiting new personnel and continual problems breaking them in. In this expanding organization “the Enemy” were presented with dramatically improved opportunities to place agents within the division. This meant in turn that internal security had to be intensified – the Security Police could no longer be a club of former officers, where everyone knew everyone else, and where the commonest qualification for a new recruit was that his father was or had been an officer.

  In 1963 Gullberg was transferred from Counter-Espionage to personnel control, a role that took on added significance in the wake of Wennerström’s exposure as a double agent. During that period the foundation was laid for the “register of political opinions,” a list which towards the end of the ’60s amounted to around 300,000 Swedish citizens who were held to harbour undesirable political sympathies. Check
ing the backgrounds of Swedish citizens was one thing, but the crucial question was: how would security control within S.I.S. itself be implemented?

  The Wennerström debacle had given rise to an avalanche of dilemmas within the Security Police. If a colonel on the defence staff could work for the Russians – he was also the government’s adviser on matters involving nuclear weapons and security policy – it followed that the Russians might have an equally senior agent within the Security Police. Who would guarantee that the top ranks and middle management at the Firm were not working for the Russians? Who, in short, was going to spy on the spies?

  In August 1964 Gullberg was summoned to an afternoon meeting with the assistant chief of the Security Police, Hans Wilhelm Francke. The other participants at the meeting were two individuals from the top echelon of the Firm, the assistant head of Secretariat and the head of Budget. Before the day was over, Gullberg had been appointed head of a newly created division with the working title of “the Special Section”. The first thing he did was to rename it “Special Analysis”. That held for a few minutes until the head of Budget pointed out that S.A. was not much better than S.S. The organization’s final name became “the Section for Special Analysis,” the S.S.A., and in daily parlance “the Section,” to differentiate it from “the Division” or “the Firm,” which referred to the Security Police as a whole.

  “The Section” was Francke’s idea. He called it “the last line of defence”. An ultra-secret unit that was given strategic positions within the Firm, but which was invisible. It was never referred to in writing, even in budget memoranda, and therefore it could not be infiltrated. Its task was to watch over national security. He had the authority to make it happen. He needed the Budget chief and the Secretariat chief to create the hidden substructure, but they were old colleagues, friends from dozens of skirmishes with the Enemy.

  During the first year the Section consisted of Gullberg and three hand-picked colleagues. Over the next ten years it grew to include no more than eleven people, of whom two were administrative secretaries of the old school and the remainder were professional spy hunters. It was a structure with only two ranks. Gullberg was the chief. He would ordinarily meet each member of his team every day. Efficiency was valued more highly than background.