Millennium 02 - The Girl Who Played with Fire Page 10

  “And how many of them are we talking about… if you extrapolate?”

  “At any given time there are about a hundred active girls who are in some way victims of trafficking. That means the total income in Sweden each month would be around six million kronor, around seventy million per year. And that’s only the girls who are victims of trafficking.”

  “That sounds like small change.”

  “It is small change. And to bring in these relatively modest sums, around a hundred girls have to be raped. It drives me mad.”

  “That sounds like an objective researcher! But how many creeps are living off these girls?”

  “I reckon about three hundred.”

  “That doesn’t sound like an insurmountable problem,” Berger said.

  “We pass laws and the media gets outraged, but hardly anyone has actually talked to one of these girls from the East or has any idea how they live.”

  “How does it work? I mean, in practice. It’s probably fairly difficult to bring a sixteen-year-old over here from Tallinn without anyone noticing. How does it work once they arrive?” Blomkvist asked.

  “When I started researching this, I thought we were talking about an incredibly well-run organization with some form of professional mafia spiriting girls unnoticed across the borders.”

  “But it’s not?” Eriksson said.

  “The business is organized, but I came to the conclusion that we’re talking about many small and badly organized gangs. Forget the Armani suits and the sports cars—the average gang is half Russians or Balts and half Swedes. The gang leader is typically forty, has very little education, and has had problems all his life. His view of women is pure stone age. There’s a clear pecking order in the gang and his associates are often afraid of him. He’s violent, frequently high, and he beats the shit out of anyone who steps out of line.”

  Salander’s furniture from IKEA was delivered at 9:30 in the morning three days later. Two extremely robust citizens shook hands with blond Irene Nesser, who spoke with a sprightly Norwegian accent. They began at once, shuttling the boxes up to the apartment in the undersized elevator, and spent the day assembling tables, cabinets, and beds. Irene Nesser went down to Söderhallarna market to buy Greek takeout for their lunch.

  The men from IKEA were gone by midafternoon. Salander took off her wig and strolled around her apartment wondering how she was going to like living in her new home. The kitchen table looked too elegant to be true. The room next to the kitchen, with doors from both the hall and the kitchen, was her new living room, with modern sofas and armchairs around a coffee table by the window. She was pleased with the bedroom and sat down tentatively on the Hemnes bedstead to test the mattress.

  She sat at the desk in her office, enjoying the view of Saltsjön. Yes, this is a good setup. I can work here.

  What she was going to work on, though, she didn’t know.

  Salander spent the rest of the evening unpacking and arranging her belongings. She made the bed and put the towels, sheets, and pillowcases in the linen closet. She opened the bags of new clothes and hung them in the closets. In spite of all she had bought, it filled only a fraction of the space. She put the lamps in place and arranged the pots and pans, the crockery, and the cutlery in the kitchen cupboards and drawers.

  She looked critically at the empty walls and realized that she was going to have to find some posters or pictures. A vase for flowers wouldn’t hurt either.

  Then she opened her cardboard boxes from Lundagatan and put away books, magazines, clippings, and old research papers that she probably should have thrown away. Without any regret, she discarded her old T-shirts and socks with holes in them. Suddenly she found a dildo, still in its original box. She smiled wryly. It had been one of those freaky birthday presents from Mimmi. She had entirely forgotten that she had it and had never even tried it. She decided to rectify that situation and set the dildo on her bedside table.

  Then she became serious. Mimmi. She felt a pang of guilt. She had been with Mimmi fairly regularly for a year and then left her for Blomkvist without a word of explanation. She had not said goodbye or told her she was thinking of leaving the country. Nor had she said goodbye to Armansky or told the girls in Evil Fingers anything at all. They must think she was dead, or else they had simply forgotten about her—she had never been a central figure in the group.

  She realized at that moment that she had not said goodbye to George Bland on Grenada either, and she wondered whether he was walking on the beach looking for her. She remembered what Blomkvist had told her about friendship being based on respect and trust. I keep squandering my friends. She wondered whether Mimmi was still around, whether she should try to get in touch with her.

  She spent most of the evening and a good part of the night sorting papers in her office, installing her computers, and surfing the Net. She did a swift check of her investments and found that she was better off than she had been a year earlier.

  She did a routine check of Bjurman’s computer but found nothing in his correspondence that gave her reason to think that he was not toeing the line. He seemed to have scaled back his professional and private activities to a semi-vegetative state. He seldom used email, and when he surfed the Internet he mostly went on porn sites.

  She did not log off until around 2:00 in the morning. She went into the bedroom and undressed, flinging her clothes over a chair. In the bathroom mirror she looked at herself for a long time, examining her angular, asymmetrical face, her new breasts. And the tattoo on her back—it was beautiful, a curving dragon in red, green, and black. During the year of her travels she had let her hair grow to shoulder length, but at the end of her stay on Grenada she had taken a pair of scissors to it. It still stuck out in all directions.

  She felt that some fundamental change had taken place or was taking place in her life. Maybe it was having access to billions of kronor and not having to think about every krona she spent. Maybe it was the adult world which was belatedly pushing its way into her life. Maybe it was the realization that, with her mother’s death, her childhood had come to an end.

  During the operation on her breasts at the clinic in Genoa, a ring in her nipple had to be removed. Then she had done away with a ring from her lower lip, and on Grenada she had taken the ring out of her left labium—it had chafed, and she had no idea why she had let herself be pierced there in the first place.

  She yawned and unscrewed the stud she had had through her tongue for seven years. She put it in a bowl on the shelf next to the sink. Her mouth felt empty. Apart from the rings in her earlobes, she had now only two piercings left: a ring in her left eyebrow and a jewel in her navel.

  At last she crept under her new duvet. The bed she had bought was gigantic; she felt as if she were lying on the edge of a soccer field. She pulled the duvet around her and thought for a long time.

  CHAPTER 6

  Sunday, January 23–Saturday, January 29

  Salander took the elevator from the garage to the third floor, the uppermost floor occupied by Milton Security in the office building near Slussen. She opened the elevator door with a card key that she had pirated several years earlier. She automatically glanced at her watch as she stepped into the unlit corridor. Sunday, 3:10 a.m. The night watchman would be sitting at the alarm station on the second floor, a long way from the elevator shaft, and she knew that she would almost certainly have this floor to herself.

  She was, as always, astonished that a security company had such basic lapses in its own operations.

  Not much had changed on the third floor in the year that had passed. She began by visiting her old office, a cubicle behind a glass wall in the corridor where Armansky had installed her. The door was unlocked. Absolutely nothing had changed, except that someone had set a cardboard box of wastepaper inside the door: the desk, the office chair, the wastepaper basket, one (empty) bookshelf, and an obsolete Dell PC with a pitifully small hard drive.

  Salander could see nothing to suggest that Armansk
y had turned the room over to anyone else. She took this to be a good sign, but she knew that it did not mean much. It was space that could hardly be put to any sensible use.

  Salander closed the door and strolled the length of the corridor, making sure that there was no night owl in any of the offices. She stopped at the coffee machine and pressed the button for a cup of cappuccino, then opened the door to Armansky’s office with her pirated card key.

  His office was, as always, irritatingly tidy. She made a brisk tour of inspection and studied the bookshelf before sitting down at his desk and switching on his computer.

  She fished out a CD from the inside pocket of her jacket and pushed it into the hard drive, then started a programme called Asphyxia 1.3. She had written it herself, and its only function was to upgrade Internet Explorer on Armansky’s computer to a more modern version. The procedure took about five minutes.

  When she was done, she ejected the CD and rebooted the computer with the new version of Internet Explorer. The programme looked and behaved exactly like the original version, but it was a tiny bit larger and a microsecond slower. All installations were identical to the original, including the install date. There would be no trace of the new file.

  She typed in an FTP address for a server in Holland and got a command screen. She clicked copy, wrote the name Armansky/MiltSec and clicked OK. The computer instantly began copying Armansky’s hard drive to the server in Holland. A clock indicated that the process would take thirty-four minutes.

  While the transfer was in progress, she took the spare key to Armansky’s desk from a pot on the bookshelf and spent the next half hour bringing herself up to date on the files Armansky kept in his top right-hand desk drawer: his crucial, current jobs. When the computer dinged as a sign that the transfer was complete, she put the files back in the order that she had found them.

  Then she shut down the computer and switched off the desk lamp, taking the empty cappuccino cup with her. She left the Milton Security building the same way she had come. It was 4:12 a.m.

  She walked home and sat down at her PowerBook and logged on to the server in Holland, where she started a copy of Asphyxia 1.3. A window opened asking for the name of the hard drive. She had forty different options and scrolled down. She passed the hard drive for NilsEBjurman, which she usually glanced through every other month. She paused for a second at MikBlom/laptop and MikBlom/Office. She had not clicked on those icons for more than a year, and she wondered vaguely whether to delete them. But she then decided as a matter of principle to hang on to them—since she had gone to the trouble of hacking into a computer it would be stupid to delete the information and maybe one day have to do the whole procedure all over again. The same was true for an icon called Wennerström which she had not opened in a long time. The man of that name was dead. The icon Armansky/MiltSec, the last one created, was at the bottom of the list.

  She could have cloned his hard drive earlier, but she had never bothered to because she worked at Milton and could easily retrieve any information that Armansky wanted to keep hidden from the rest of the world. Her trespassing in his computer was not malicious: she just wanted to know what the company was working on, to see the lay of the land. She clicked and a folder immediately opened with a new icon called ArmanskyHD. She tried out whether she could access the hard drive and checked that all the files were in place.

  She read through Armansky’s reports, financial statements, and email until 7:00 a.m. Finally she crawled into bed and slept until 12:30 in the afternoon.

  On the last Friday in January Millennium’s annual board meeting took place in the presence of the company’s bookkeeper, an outside auditor, and the four partners: Berger (30 percent), Blomkvist (20 percent), Malm (20 percent), and Harriet Vanger (30 percent). Eriksson was there as the representative of the staff and the staff committee, and the chair of the union at the magazine. The union consisted of Eriksson, Lotta Karim, Cortez, Nilsson, and marketing chief Sonny Magnusson. It was Eriksson’s first board meeting.

  The meeting began at 4:00 and lasted an hour. Much of the time was spent on the financials and the audit report. Clearly Millennium was on a solid footing, very different from the crisis in which the company had been mired two years earlier. The auditors reported a profit of 2.1 million kronor, of which roughly 1 million was down to Blomkvist’s book about the Wennerström affair.

  Berger proposed, and it was agreed, that 1 million be set aside as a fund against future crises; that 250,000 kronor be reserved for capital investments, such as new computers and other equipment, and repairs at the editorial offices; and that 300,000 kronor be earmarked for salary increases and to allow them to offer Cortez a full-time contract. Of the balance, a dividend of 50,000 kronor was proposed for each partner, and 100,000 kronor to be divided equally among the four employees regardless of whether they worked full-or part-time. Magnusson was to receive no bonus. His contract gave him a commission on the ads he sold, and periodically these made him the highest paid of all the staff. These proposals were adopted unanimously.

  Blomkvist proposed that the freelance budget be reduced in favour of an additional part-time reporter. Blomkvist had Svensson in mind; he would then be able to use Millennium as a base for his freelance writing and later, if it all worked out, be hired full-time. The proposal met with resistance from Berger on the grounds that the magazine could not thrive without access to a large number of freelance articles. She was supported by Harriet Vanger; Malm abstained. It was decided that the freelance budget would not be touched, but it would be investigated whether adjustments of other expenses might be made. Everyone wanted Svensson on the staff, at the very least as a part-time contributor.

  There followed a brief discussion about future direction and development plans; Berger was reelected as chair of the board for the coming year; and then the meeting was adjourned.

  Eriksson had said not a word. She was content at the prospect that she and her colleagues would get a bonus of 25,000 kronor, more than a month’s salary.

  At the close of the board meeting, Berger called for a partners’ meeting. Berger, Blomkvist, Malm, and Harriet Vanger remained while the others left the conference room. Berger declared the meeting open. “There is only one item on the agenda,” she said. “Harriet, according to the agreement we made with Henrik, his part ownership was to last for two years. The agreement is about to expire. We have to decide what is going to happen with your—or rather, Henrik’s—interest in Millennium.”

  “We all know that my uncle’s investment was an impulsive gesture triggered by a most unusual situation,” Harriet said. “That situation no longer exists. What do you propose?”

  Malm squirmed with annoyance. He was the only one in the room who did not know what that “unusual situation” was. Blomkvist and Berger had to keep the story from him. Berger had told him only that it was a matter so personal involving Blomkvist that he would never under any circumstances discuss it. Malm was smart enough to realize that Blomkvist’s silence had something to do with Hedestad and Harriet Vanger. He also knew that he didn’t need all the details to be able to make a decision, and he had enough respect for Blomkvist not to make an issue of it.

  “The three of us have discussed the matter and we have arrived at a decision,” Berger said. She looked Harriet in the eye. “But before we explain our reasoning we would like to know what you think.”

  Harriet Vanger glanced at them in turn. Her gaze lingered on Blomkvist, but she could not read anything from their expressions.

  “If you want to buy the family out it will cost around three million kronor plus interest. Can you afford to buy us out?” she asked mildly.

  “Yes, we can,” Blomkvist said with a smile.

  He had been paid five million kronor by Henrik Vanger for the work he had done for the old industrial tycoon. Part of that work, ironically, had been to find out what had happened to Harriet, his niece.

  “In that case, the decision is in your hands,” Harriet said. “Th
e agreement stipulates that you can cancel the Vanger shareholding as of today. I would never have written a contract as sloppy as the one Henrik signed.”

  “We can buy you out if we have to,” Berger said. “But the real question is what you want to do. You’re the CEO of a substantial industrial concern—two concerns, actually. Our annual budget might correspond to what you turn over during a coffee break. Why would you give your time to a business as marginal as Millennium?”

  Harriet Vanger looked calmly at the chair of the board, saying nothing for a long moment. Then she turned to Blomkvist and replied:

  “I’ve been the owner of something or other since the day I was born. And I spend my days running a corporation that has more intrigues than a four-hundred-page romance novel. When I first joined your board it was to fulfil obligations that I could not neglect. But you know what? During the past eighteen months I’ve realized that I’m having more fun on this board than on all the others put together.”

  Blomkvist absorbed this thoughtfully. Vanger now turned to Malm.

  “The problems you face at Millennium are small and manageable. Naturally the company wants to operate at a profit—that’s a given. But all of you have another goal—you want to achieve something.”

  She took a sip from her glass of water and fixed her eyes on Berger.

  “Exactly what that something is remains a bit unclear to me. The objective is hazy. You aren’t a political party or a special-interest group. You have no loyalties to consider except your own. But you pinpoint flaws in society, and you don’t mind entering into battles with public figures. Often you want to change things and make a real difference. You all pretend to be cynics and nihilists, but it’s your own morality that steers the magazine, and several times I’ve noticed that it’s quite a special sort of morality. I don’t know what to call it, except to say that Millennium has a soul. This is the only board I’m proud to be a part of.”