Millennium 02 - The Girl Who Played with Fire Read online

  It was her ability to pass freely into other people’s computers that had given him the material which transformed his professional humiliation into what was to be “the Wennerström affair”—a scoop that a year later was still the subject of international police investigations into unsolved financial crimes. And Blomkvist was still being invited to appear on TV talk shows.

  At the time, a year ago, he had thought of the scoop with colossal satisfaction—as vengeance and as rehabilitation. But the satisfaction had soon ebbed. Within a few weeks he was sick and tired of answering the same questions from journalists and the financial police. I’m sorry, but I can’t reveal my sources. When a reporter from the English-language Azerbaijan Times had come all the way to Stockholm to ask him the same questions, it was the last straw. Blomkvist cut the interviews to a minimum, and in recent months he had relented only when the woman from She on TV4 talked him into it, and that had happened only because the investigation had apparently moved into a new phase.

  Blomkvist’s cooperation with the woman from TV4 had another dimension. She had been the first journalist to pounce on the story, and without her programme on the evening that Millennium released the scoop, it might not have made the impact it did. Only later did Blomkvist find out that she had had to fight tooth and nail to convince her editor to run it. There had been massive resistance to giving any prominence to “that clown” at Millennium, and right up to the moment she went on air, it was far from certain that the battery of company lawyers would give the story the all clear. Several of her more senior colleagues had given it a thumbs-down and told her that if she was wrong, her career was over. She stood her ground, and it became the story of the year.

  She had covered the story herself that first week—after all, she was the only reporter who had thoroughly researched the subject—but some time before Christmas Blomkvist noticed that all the new angles in the story had been handed over to male colleagues. Around New Year’s Blomkvist heard through the grapevine that she had been elbowed out, with the excuse that such an important story should be handled by experienced financial reporters, and not some little girl from Gotland or Bergslagen or wherever the hell she was from. The next time TV4 called, Blomkvist explained frankly that he would talk to them only if “she” asked the questions. Days of sullen silence went by before the boys at TV4 capitulated.

  Blomkvist’s waning interest in the Wennerström affair coincided with Salander’s disappearance from his life. He still could not understand what had happened.

  They had parted two days after Christmas, and he had not seen her for the rest of the week. On the day before New Year’s Eve he telephoned her, but there was no answer.

  On New Year’s Eve he went to her apartment twice and rang the bell. The first time there had been lights on, but she had not answered the door. The second time there were no lights. On New Year’s Day he called her again, and still there was no answer, but he did get a message from the telephone company saying that the subscriber could not be reached.

  He had seen her twice in the next few days. When he could not get hold of her on the phone, he went to her apartment and sat down to wait on the steps beside her front door. He had brought a book with him, and he waited stubbornly for four hours before she appeared through the main entrance, just before 11:00 at night. She was carrying a brown box and stopped short when she saw him.

  “Hello, Lisbeth,” he said, closing his book.

  She looked at him without expression, no sign of warmth or even friendship in her gaze. Then she walked past him and stuck her key in the door.

  “Aren’t you going to offer me a cup of coffee?” he said.

  She turned and said in a low voice: “Get out of here. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

  Then she shut the door in his face, and he heard her lock it from the inside. He was bewildered.

  Three days later, he had taken the tunnelbana from Slussen to T-Centralen, and when the train stopped in Gamla Stan he looked out the window and she was standing on the platform less than two yards away. He caught sight of her at the exact moment the doors closed. For five seconds she stared right through him, as though he were nothing but air, before she turned and walked out of his field of vision as the train began to move.

  The implication was unmistakable. She wanted nothing to do with him. She had cut him out of her life as surgically and decisively as she deleted files from her computer, and without explanation. She had changed her mobile phone number and did not answer her email.

  Blomkvist sighed, switched off the TV, and went to the window to gaze out at City Hall.

  Perhaps he was making a mistake in going to her apartment from time to time. His attitude had always been that if a woman clearly indicated that she did not want anything more to do with him, he would go on his way. Not respecting such a message would, in his eyes, show a lack of respect for her.

  Blomkvist and Salander had slept together. It had been at her initiative, and the relationship had lasted for half a year. If it was her decision to end the affair—as surprisingly as she had started it—then that was OK with Blomkvist. He had no difficulty with the role of ex-boyfriend—if that was what he was—but Salander’s total repudiation of him was astonishing.

  He was not in love with her—they were about as unlike as two people could possibly be—but he was very fond of her and really missed her, as exasperating as she sometimes was. He had thought their liking was mutual. In short, he felt like an idiot.

  He stood at the window a long time.

  Finally he made a decision. If Salander thought so little of him that she could not even bring herself to greet him when they saw each other in the tunnelbana, then their friendship was apparently over and the damage irreparable. He would make no attempt to contact her again.

  Salander looked at her watch and realized that although she was sitting, perfectly still, in the shade, she was drenched with sweat. It was 10:30. She memorized a mathematical formula three lines long and closed her book, Dimensions in Mathematics. Then she picked up her key and the pack of cigarettes on the table.

  Her room was on the third floor, which was also the top floor of the hotel. She stripped off her clothes and got into the shower.

  A green lizard eight inches long was staring at her from the wall just below the ceiling. Salander stared back but made no move to shoo it away. There were lizards everywhere on the island. They came through the blinds at the open window, under the door, or through the vent in the bathroom. She liked having company that left her alone. The water was almost ice cold, and she stayed under the shower for five minutes to cool off.

  When she came back into the room she stood naked in front of the mirror on the wardrobe door and examined her body with amazement. She still weighed less than ninety pounds and stood four foot eleven. Well, there was not much she could do about that. She had doll-like, almost delicate limbs, small hands, and hardly any hips.

  But now she had breasts.

  All her life she had been flat-chested, as if she had never reached puberty. She thought it had looked ridiculous, and she was always uncomfortable showing herself naked.

  Now, all of a sudden, she had breasts. They were by no means gigantic—that was not what she had wanted, and they would have looked ridiculous on her otherwise skinny body—but they were two solid, round breasts of medium size. The enlargement had been well done, and the proportions were reasonable. But the difference was dramatic, both for her looks and for her self-confidence.

  She had spent five weeks in a clinic outside Genoa getting the implants that formed the structure of her new breasts. The clinic and the doctors there had absolutely the best reputation in all of Europe. Her own doctor, a charmingly hard-boiled woman named Alessandra Perrini, had told her that her breasts were abnormally underdeveloped, and that the enlargement could therefore be performed for medical reasons.

  Recovery from the operation had not been painless, but her breasts looked and felt completely natural, and by
now the scars were almost invisible. She had not regretted her decision for a second. She was pleased. Even six months later she could not walk past a mirror with her top off without stopping and feeling glad that she had improved her quality of life.

  During her time at the clinic in Genoa she had also had one of her nine tattoos removed—a one-inch-long wasp—from the right side of her neck. She liked her tattoos, especially the dragon on her left shoulder blade. But the wasp was conspicuous and it made her too easy to remember and identify. Salander did not want to be remembered or identified. The tattoo had been removed by laser treatment, and when she ran her index finger over her neck she could feel the slight scarring. Closer inspection would reveal that her suntanned skin was a shade lighter where the tattoo had been, but at a glance nothing was noticeable. Altogether her stay in Genoa had cost 190,000 kronor.

  Which she could afford.

  She stopped dreaming in front of the mirror and put on her panties and bra. Two days after she had left the clinic in Genoa she had for the first time in her twenty-five years gone to a lingerie boutique and bought the garments she had never needed before. Since then she had turned twenty-six, and now she wore a bra with a certain amount of satisfaction.

  She put on jeans and a black T-shirt with the slogan CONSIDER THIS A FAIR WARNING. She found her sandals and sun hat and slung a black bag over her shoulder.

  Crossing the lobby, she heard a murmur from a small group of hotel guests at the front desk. She slowed down and pricked up her ears.

  “Just how dangerous is she?” said a black woman with a loud voice and a European accent. Salander recognized her as one of a charter group from London who had been there for ten days.

  Freddy McBain, the greying reception manager who always greeted Salander with a friendly smile, looked worried. He was telling them that instructions would be issued to all guests and that there was no reason to worry as long as they followed all the instructions to the letter. He was met by a hail of questions.

  Salander frowned and went out to the bar, where she found Ella Carmichael behind the counter.

  “What’s all that about?” she said, motioning with her thumb towards the front desk.

  “Matilda is threatening to visit us.”

  “Matilda?”

  “Matilda is a hurricane that formed off Brazil a few weeks ago and yesterday tore straight through Paramaribo, the capital of Surinam. No-one’s quite sure what direction it’s going to take—probably further north towards the States. But if it goes on following the coast to the west, then Trinidad and Grenada will be smack in its path. So it might get a bit windy.”

  “I thought the hurricane season was over.”

  “It is. It’s usually September and October. But these days you never can tell, because there’s so much trouble with the climate and the greenhouse effect and all that.”

  “OK. But when’s Matilda supposed to arrive?”

  “Soon.”

  “Is there something I should do?”

  “Lisbeth, hurricanes are not for playing around with. We had one in the seventies that caused a lot of destruction here on Grenada. I was eleven years old and lived in a town up in the Grand Etang on the way to Grenville, and I will never forget that night.”

  “Hmm.”

  “But you don’t need to worry. Stay close to the hotel on Saturday. Pack a bag with things you wouldn’t want to lose—like that computer you’re always playing with—and be prepared to take it along if we get instructions to go down to the storm cellar. That’s all.”

  “Right.”

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  Salander left without saying goodbye. Ella Carmichael smiled, resigned. It had taken her a couple of weeks to get used to this odd girl’s peculiar ways and to realize that she was not being snooty—she was just very different. But she paid for her drinks without any fuss, stayed relatively sober, kept to herself, and never caused any trouble.

  The traffic on Grenada consisted mainly of imaginatively decorated minibuses that operated with no particular timetable or other formalities. The shuttle ran during the daylight hours. After dark it was pretty much impossible to get around without your own car.

  Salander had to wait only a few minutes on the road to St. George’s before one of the buses pulled up. The driver was a Rasta, and the bus’s sound system was playing “No Woman No Cry” full blast. She closed her ears, paid her dollar, and squeezed in next to a substantial woman with grey hair and two boys in school uniforms.

  St. George’s was located on a U-shaped bay that formed the Carenage, the inner harbour. Around the harbour rose steep hills dotted with houses and old colonial buildings, with Fort Rupert perched all the way out on the tip of a precipitous cliff.

  St. George’s was a compact and tight-knit town with narrow streets and many alleyways. The houses climbed up every hillside, and there was hardly a flat surface larger than the combined cricket field and racetrack on the northern edge of the town.

  She got off at the harbour and walked to MacIntyre’s Electronics at the top of a short, steep slope. Almost all the products sold on Grenada were imported from the United States or Britain, so they cost twice as much as they did elsewhere, but at least the shop had air-conditioning.

  The extra batteries she had ordered for her Apple PowerBook (G4 titanium with a seventeen-inch screen) had finally arrived. In Miami she had bought a Palm PDA with a folding keyboard that she could use for email and easily take with her in her shoulder bag instead of dragging around her PowerBook, but it was a miserable substitute for the seventeen-inch screen. The original batteries had deteriorated and would run for only half an hour before they had to be recharged, which was a curse when she wanted to sit out on the terrace by the pool, and the electrical supply on Grenada left a lot to be desired. During the weeks she had been there, she had experienced two long blackouts. She paid with a credit card in the name of Wasp Enterprises, stuffed the batteries in her shoulder bag, and headed back out into the midday heat.

  She paid a visit to Barclays Bank and withdrew $300, then went down to the market and bought a bunch of carrots, half a dozen mangoes, and a big bottle of mineral water. Her bag was much heavier now, and by the time she got back to the harbour she was hungry and thirsty. She considered the Nutmeg first, but the entrance to the restaurant was jammed with people already waiting. She went on to the quieter Turtleback at the other end of the harbour. There she sat on the veranda and ordered a plate of calamari and chips with a bottle of Carib, the local beer. She picked up a discarded copy of the Grenadian Voice and looked through it for two minutes. The only thing of interest was a dramatic article warning about the possible arrival of Matilda. The text was illustrated with a photograph showing a demolished house, a reminder of the devastation wrought by the last big hurricane to hit the island.

  She folded the paper, took a swig from the bottle of Carib, and then she saw the man from room 32 come out on the veranda from the bar. He had his brown briefcase in one hand and a glass of Coca-Cola in the other. His eyes swept over her without recognition before he sat on a bench at the other end of the veranda and fixed his gaze on the water beyond.

  He seemed utterly preoccupied and sat there motionless for seven minutes, Salander observed, before he raised his glass and took three deep swallows. Then he put down the glass and resumed staring out to sea. After a while she opened her bag and took out Dimensions in Mathematics.

  All her life Salander had loved puzzles and riddles. When she was nine her mother gave her a Rubik’s Cube. It had put her abilities to the test for barely forty frustrating minutes before she understood how it worked. After that she never had any difficulty solving the puzzle. She had never missed the daily newspapers’ intelligence tests; five strangely shaped figures and the puzzle was how the sixth one should look. To her, the answer was always obvious.

  In elementary school she had learned to add and subtract. Multiplication, division, and geom
etry were a natural extension. She could add up the bill in a restaurant, create an invoice, and calculate the path of an artillery shell fired at a certain speed and angle. That was easy. But before she read the article in Popular Science she had never been intrigued by mathematics or even thought about the fact that the multiplication table was math. It was something she memorized one afternoon at school, and she never understood why the teacher kept going on about it for the whole year.

  Then, suddenly, she sensed the inexorable logic that must reside behind the reasoning and the formulas, and that led her to the mathematics section of the university bookshop. But it was not until she started on Dimensions in Mathematics that a whole new world opened to her. Mathematics was actually a logical puzzle with endless variations—riddles that could be solved. The trick was not to solve arithmetical problems. Five times five would always be twenty-five. The trick was to understand combinations of the various rules that made it possible to solve any mathematical problem whatsoever.

  Dimensions in Mathematics was not strictly a textbook but rather a 1,200-page brick about the history of mathematics from the ancient Greeks to modern-day attempts to understand spherical astronomy. It was considered the bible of math, in a class with what the Arithmetica of Diophantus had meant (and still did mean) to serious mathematicians. When she opened Dimensions in Mathematics for the first time on the terrace of the hotel on Grand Anse Beach, she was enticed into an enchanted world of figures. This was a book written by an author who was both pedagogical and able to entertain the reader with anecdotes and astonishing problems. She could follow mathematics from Archimedes to today’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. She had taken in the methods they used to solve problems.

  Pythagoras’ equation (x2 + y2 = z2), formulated five centuries before Christ, was an epiphany. At that moment Salander understood the significance of what she had memorized in secondary school from some of the few classes she had attended. In a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. She was fascinated by Euclid’s discovery in about 300 BC that a perfect number is always a multiple of two numbers, in which one number is a power of 2 and the second consists of the difference between the next power of 2 and 1. This was a refinement of Pythagoras’ equation, and she could see the endless combinations.