CHAPTER 13
Tuesday, May 17

Figuerola woke at 6:10 on Tuesday morning, took a long run along Norr Mälarstrand, showered, and clocked in at police headquarters at 8:10. She prepared a memorandum on the conclusions she had reached the day before.

At 9:00 Edklinth arrived. She gave him twenty minutes to deal with his mail, then knocked on his door. She waited while he read her four pages. At last he looked up.

“The chief of Secretariat,” he said.

“He must have approved loaning out Mårtensson. So he must know that Mårtensson is not at Counter-Espionage, even though according to Personal Protection that’s where he is.”

Edklinth took off his glasses and polished them thoroughly with a paper napkin. He had met Chief of Secretariat Albert Shenke at meetings and internal conferences on countless occasions, but he couldn’t claim to know the man well. Shenke was rather short, with thin reddish-blond hair and a waistline that had expanded over the years. He was about fifty-five and had worked at SIS for at least twenty-five years, possibly longer. He had been chief of Secretariat for a decade, and was assistant chief before that. Edklinth thought of him as a taciturn man who could act ruthlessly when necessary. He had no idea what he did in his free time, but he had a memory of having once seen him in the garage of the police building in casual clothes, with a golf bag slung over his shoulder. He had also run into him once at the opera.

“There was one thing that struck me,” Figuerola said.

“What’s that?”

“Evert Gullberg. He did his military service in the forties and became a tax attorney, and then in the fifties he vanished into thin air.”

“And?”

“When we were discussing this yesterday, we talked about him as if he were some sort of hired killer.”

“It sounds far-fetched, I know, but—”

“It struck me that there is so little background on him it seems almost like a smokescreen. Both IB and SIS established cover companies outside the building in the fifties and sixties.”

“I was wondering when you’d think of that,” Edklinth said.

“I’d like permission to go through the personnel files from the fifties,” Figuerola said.

“No,” Edklinth said, shaking his head. “We can’t go into the archives without authorization from the chief of Secretariat, and we don’t want to attract attention until we have more to go on.”

“So what next?”

“Mårtensson,” Edklinth said. “Find out what he’s working on.”

Salander was studying the vent window in her room when she heard the key turn in the door. In came Jonasson. It was past 10:00 on Tuesday night. He had interrupted her planning how to break out of Sahlgrenska hospital.

She had measured the window and discovered that her head would fit through it and that she would not have much problem squeezing the rest of her body through. It was three storeys to the ground, but a combination of torn sheets and a ten-foot extension cord from a floor lamp would solve that problem.

She had plotted her escape step by step. The problem was what she would wear. She had underwear, a hospital nightshirt, and a pair of plastic flip-flops that she had managed to borrow. She had 200 kronor in cash from Annika Giannini to pay for sweets from the hospital snack shop. That should be enough for a cheap pair of jeans and a T-shirt at the Salvation Army store, if she could find one in Göteborg. She would have to spend what was left of the money on a call to Plague, a fellow member of Hacker Republic. Then everything would work out. She planned on landing in Gibraltar a few days after she escaped, and from there she would create a new identity somewhere in the world.

Jonasson sat in the guest chair. She sat on the edge of her bed.

“Hello, Lisbeth. I’m sorry I haven’t come to see you the past few days, but I’ve been up to my ears in the ER, and I’ve also been made a mentor for a couple of interns.”

She hadn’t expected Jonasson to make special visits to see her.

He picked up her chart and studied her temperature graph and the record of medications. Her temperature was steady, between 98.6 and 98.9 degrees, and for the past week she had not taken any headache tablets.

“Dr. Endrin is your doctor. Do you get along with her?”

“She’s all right,” Salander said without enthusiasm.

“Is it OK if I do an examination?”

She nodded. He took a penlight out of his pocket and bent over to shine it into her eyes, to see how her pupils contracted and expanded. He asked her to open her mouth and examined her throat. Then he placed his hands gently around her neck and moved her head back and forth and to the sides a few times.

“You don’t have any pain in your neck?” he said.

She shook her head.

“How’s the headache?”

“I feel it now and then, but it passes.”

“The healing process is ongoing. The headache will eventually disappear altogether.”

Her hair was still so short that he hardly needed to push aside the tufts to feel the scar above her ear. It was healing, but there was a small scab.

“You’ve been scratching the wound. You shouldn’t do that.”

She nodded. He took her left elbow and raised the arm.

“Can you lift it by yourself?”

She lifted her arm.

“Do you have any pain or discomfort in the shoulder?”

She shook her head.

“Does it feel tight?”

“A little.”

“I think you have to do a bit more physical therapy on your shoulder muscles.”

“It’s hard when you’re locked up like this.”

He smiled at her. “That won’t last. Are you doing the exercises the therapist recommended?”

She nodded.

He pressed his stethoscope against his wrist for a moment to warm it. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and untied the strings of her nightshirt, listened to her heart, and took her pulse. He asked her to lean forward and placed the stethoscope on her back to listen to her lungs.

“Cough.”

She coughed.

“OK, you can do up your nightshirt and get into bed. From a medical standpoint, you’re just about recovered.”

She expected him to get up and say he would come back in a few days, but he stayed, sitting on the bed. He seemed to be thinking about something. Salander waited patiently.

“Do you know why I became a doctor?” he said.

She shook her head.

“I come from a working-class family. I always thought I wanted to be a doctor. I’d actually thought about becoming a psychiatrist when I was a teenager. I was terribly intellectual.”

Salander looked at him with sudden alertness as soon as he mentioned the word psychiatrist.

“But I wasn’t sure I could handle the studies. So when I finished school I studied to be a welder and I even worked as one for several years. I thought it was a good idea to have something to fall back on if the medical studies didn’t work out. And being a welder wasn’t so different from being a doctor. It’s all about patching things up. Now I’m working here at Sahlgrenska and patching up people like you.”

She wondered if he was pulling her leg.

“Lisbeth, I’m wondering . . .”

He then said nothing for such a long time that Salander almost asked what he wanted. But she waited for him to speak.

“Would you be angry if I asked you a personal question? I want to ask you as a private individual, not as a doctor. I won’t make any record of your answer, and I won’t discuss it with anyone else. And you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“What is it?”

“Since you were shut up at St. Stefan’s when you were twelve, you’ve refused to respond when any psychiatrist has tried to talk to you. Why is that?”

Salander’s eyes darkened, but they were utterly expressionless as she looked at Jonasson. She sat in silence for two minutes.

“Why do you want to know?” she said at last.

“To be honest, I’m not really sure. I think I’m trying to understand something.”

Her lips curled a little. “I don’t talk to crazy-doctors because they never listen to what I have to say.”

Jonasson laughed. “OK. Tell me . . . what do you think of Peter Teleborian?”

Jonasson threw out the name so unexpectedly that Salander almost jumped. Her eyes narrowed.

“What the hell is this, Twenty Questions? What are you after?” Her voice sounded like sandpaper.

Jonasson leaned forward, almost too close.

“Because a—what did you call it—a crazy-doctor by the name of Peter Teleborian, who’s somewhat renowned in my profession, has been to see me twice in the past few days, trying to convince me to let him examine you.”

Salander felt an icy chill run down her spine.

“The district court is going to appoint him to do a forensic psychiatric assessment of you.”

“And?”

“I don’t like the man. I’ve told him he can’t see you. Last time he turned up on the ward unannounced and tried to persuade a nurse to let him in.”

Salander pressed her lips tight.

“His behaviour was a bit odd and a little too eager. So I want to know what you think of him.”

This time it was Jonasson’s turn to wait patiently for Salander’s reply.

“Teleborian is a beast,” she said at last.

“Is it something personal between the two of you?”

“You could say that.”

“I’ve also had a conversation with an official who wants me to let Teleborian see you.”

“And?”

“I asked what sort of medical expertise he thought he had to assess your condition and then I told him to go to hell. More diplomatically than that, of course. And one last question. Why are you talking to me?”

“You asked me a question, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I’m a doctor and I’ve studied psychiatry. So why are you talking to me? Should I take it to mean that you have a certain amount of trust in me?”

She did not reply.

“Then I’ll choose to interpret it that way. I want you to know this: you are my patient. That means that I work for you and not for anyone else.”

She gave him a suspicious look. He looked back at her for a moment. Then he spoke in a lighter tone of voice.

“From a medical standpoint, as I said, you’re more or less healthy. But unfortunately you’re a bit too healthy.”

“Why ‘unfortunately’?”

He gave her a cheerful smile. “You’re getting better too fast.”

“What do you mean?”

“It means that I have no legitimate reason to keep you isolated here. And the prosecutor will soon be having you transferred to a prison in Stockholm to await trial in six weeks. I’m guessing that such a request will arrive next week. And that means that Teleborian will be given the chance to observe you.”

She sat utterly still. Jonasson seemed distracted, and he bent over to arrange her pillow. He spoke as if thinking out loud.

“You don’t have much of a headache or any fever, so Dr. Endrin is probably going to discharge you.” He stood up suddenly. “Thanks for talking to me. I’ll come back and see you before you’re transferred.”

He was already at the door when she spoke.

“Dr. Jonasson?”

He turned towards her.

“Thank you.”

He nodded curtly once before he went out and locked the door.

Salander stared for a long time at the locked door. And then she lay back and stared up at the ceiling.

That was when she felt that there was something hard beneath her head. She lifted the pillow and saw to her surprise a small cloth bag that had definitely not been there before. She opened it and stared in amazement at a Palm Tungsten T3 hand-held computer and battery charger. Then she looked more closely at the computer and saw the little scratch on the top left corner. Her heart skipped a beat. It’s my Palm. But how . . . ? In amazement she glanced over at the locked door. Jonasson was a catalogue of surprises. In great excitement, she turned on the computer and discovered that it was password-protected.

She stared in frustration at the blinking screen. It seemed to be challenging her. How the hell did they think I would . . . ? Then she looked in the cloth bag and found at the bottom a scrap of folded paper. She unfolded it and read a line written in an elegant script:

Salander laughed aloud for the first time in weeks. Touché. She thought for a few seconds. Then she picked up the stylus and wrote the number combination 9277, which corresponded to the letters W-A-S-P on the keyboard. It was a code that Kalle Fucking Blomkvist had been forced to work out when he got into her apartment on Fiskargatan uninvited and tripped the burglar alarm.

It did not work.

She tried 52553, which corresponded to the letters K-A-L-L-E.

That did not work either. Since Blomkvist presumably intended that she should use the computer, he must have chosen a simple password. He had used the signature Kalle, which normally he hated. She free-associated. She thought for a moment. It must be some insult. Then she typed in 74774, which corresponded to the word P-I-P-P-I—Pippi Fucking Longstocking.

The computer started up.

There was a smiley face on the screen with a cartoon speech balloon:

She found the document [Hi, Sally] at the top of the list. She clicked on it and read:

Salander read his letter twice, staring in bewilderment at the Palm. After a period of computer celibacy, she was suffering from massive cyber-abstinence. And she wondered which big toe Blomkvist had been thinking with when he smuggled her a computer but forgot that she needed a mobile to connect to the Net.

She was still thinking when she heard footsteps in the corridor. She turned the computer off at once and shoved it under her pillow. As she heard the key in the door she realized that the cloth bag and charger were still in view on the bedside table. She reached out and slid the bag under the covers and pressed the coil of cord into her crotch. She lay passively looking up at the ceiling when the night nurse came in, said a polite hello, and asked how she was doing and whether she needed anything.

Salander told her that she was doing fine and that she wanted a pack of cigarettes. This request was turned down in a firm but friendly tone. She was given a pack of nicotine gum. As the nurse was closing the door, Salander glimpsed the guard on his chair out in the corridor. She waited until she heard the nurse’s steps receding before she once again picked up her Palm.

She turned it on and searched for connectivity.

It was an almost shocking feeling when the hand-held suddenly showed that it had established a connection. Contact with the Net. Unbelievable.

She jumped out of bed so fast that she felt a pain in her injured hip. How? She walked all the way around the room, examining every nook and cranny. No, there was no mobile. And yet she had connectivity. Then a crooked grin spread across her face. The connection was radio-controlled and locked into a mobile via Bluetooth, which had a range of ten to twelve yards. Her eyes lit upon an air vent just below the ceiling.

Kalle Fucking Blomkvist had somehow planted a mobile just outside her room. That could be the only explanation.

But why not smuggle in the mobile too? Ah, of course. The batteries.

Her Palm had to be recharged only once every three days. A mobile that was connected, if she surfed it hard, would burn out its batteries in much less time. Blomkvist—or more likely somebody he had hired and who was out there—would have to change the batteries at regular intervals.

But he had sent in the charger for her Palm. He isn’t so stupid after all.

Salander began by deciding where to keep the hand-held. She had to find a hiding place. There were outlets by the door and in the panel behind the bed, which provided electricity for her bedside lamp and digital clock. There was a recess where a radio had been removed. She smiled. Both the battery charger and the Palm could fit in there. She could use the outlet inside the bedside table to charge the Palm during the day.

Salander was happy. Her heart was pounding hard when she started up the hand-held for the first time in two months and ventured onto the Internet.

Surfing on a Palm hand-held with a tiny screen and a stylus was not the same thing as surfing on a PowerBook with a seventeen-inch screen. But she was connected. From her bed at Sahlgrenska she could now reach the entire world.

She started by going to a website that advertised rather uninteresting pictures by an unknown and not especially skilled amateur photographer named Gil Bates in Jobsville, Pennsylvania. Salander had once checked it out and confirmed that the town of Jobsville did not exist. Nevertheless, Bates had taken more than 200 photographs of the community and created a gallery of small thumbnails. She scrolled down to image 167 and clicked to enlarge it. It showed the church in Jobsville. She put her cursor on the spire of the church tower and clicked. She instantly got a pop-up dialog box that asked for her ID and password. She took out her stylus and wrote the word Remarkable on the screen as her ID and A(89)Cx#magnolia as the password.

She got a dialog box with the text [Error—you have the wrong password] and a button that said [OK—try again]. Lisbeth knew that if she clicked on [OK—try again] and tried a different password, she would get the same dialog box again—for years and years, for as long as she kept trying. Instead she clicked on the o in Error.

The screen went blank. Then an animated door opened and a Lara Croft–like figure stepped out. A speech bubble materialized with the text [WHO GOES THERE?]. She clicked on the bubble and wrote Wasp. She got the instant reply [PROVE IT—OR ELSE . . . ] as the animated Lara Croft unlocked the safety catch on her gun. Salander knew it was no empty threat. If she entered the wrong password three times in a row the site would shut down and the name Wasp would be struck from the membership list. Carefully she entered the password MonkeyBusiness.

The screen changed again and now had a blue background with the text:

She clicked on (d) Talk and then went to the menu selection [Who’s online?] and got a list with the names Andy, Bambi, Dakota, Jabba, BuckRogers, Mandrake, Pred, Slip, SisterJen, SixOfOne, and Trinity.

Salander was not sure, but she suspected that Dakota was a woman. The other citizens online, including the one who called himself SisterJen, were guys. Hacker Republic had a total (the last time she was connected) of sixty-two citizens, of whom four were female.

He got abuse from five directions at once.

Of the sixty-two citizens, Wasp had met two face-to-face. Plague, who for some strange reason was not online, was one. Trinity was the other. He was English and lived in London. Two years earlier she had met him for a few hours when he helped her and Blomkvist in the hunt for Harriet Vanger by doing an illegal tapping of a landline in St. Albans. Salander fumbled with the clumsy stylus and wished she had a keyboard.

Salander summed up her situation in five lines, which were greeted by a worried muttering.

The citizens of Hacker Republic did not generally spread computer viruses. On the contrary—they were hackers and consequently implacable adversaries of those idiots who created viruses whose sole purpose was to sabotage the Net and crash computers. The citizens were information junkies and wanted a functioning Internet that they could hack.

But their proposal to shut down the Swedish government was not an idle threat. Hacker Republic comprised a very exclusive club of the best of the best, an elite force that any defence organization in the world would have paid enormous sums to use for cyber-military purposes, if the citizens could be persuaded to feel any kind of loyalty to any state. Which was not very likely.

But they were every one of them computer wizards, and they were well versed in the art of contriving viruses. Nor did they need much convincing to carry out particular campaigns if the situation warranted. Some years earlier a citizen of Hacker Republic, who in his private life was a software developer in California, had been cheated out of a patent by a hot dot-com company that had the nerve to take the citizen to court. This caused the activists in Hacker Republic to devote a startling amount of energy for six months to hacking and destroying every computer owned by that company. All the company’s secrets and emails—along with some fake documents that might lead people to think that its CEO was involved in tax fraud—were gleefully posted on the Net, along with information about the CEO’s now not-so-secret mistress and pictures from a party in Hollywood in which he could be seen snorting cocaine. The company went under in six months, and several years later some members of the “people’s militia” in Hacker Republic, who did not easily forget an enemy, were still haunting the former CEO.

If fifty of the world’s foremost hackers decided to launch a coordinated attack against an entire country, the country might survive, but not without serious problems. The costs would certainly run into the billions if Salander gave it the thumbs-up. She thought for a moment.

Salander leaned back against the pillow and followed the conversation with a smile. She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet. The fact was that if Salander could claim to have any sort of family or group affiliation, then it was with these lunatics. None of them actually had a hope of helping her with the problems she had with the Swedish state. But she knew that if the need arose, they would devote both time and cunning to performing effective demonstrations of their powers. Through this network she could also find herself hideouts abroad. It had been Plague’s contacts on the Net who had provided her with a Norwegian passport in the name of Irene Nesser.

Salander had no idea who the citizens of Hacker Republic were, and she had only a vague notion of what they did when they were not on the Net—the citizens were uniformly vague about their identities. SixOfOne had once claimed that he was a black, male American of Catholic origin living in Toronto. He could just as easily be white, female, and Lutheran, and living in Skövde.

The one she knew best was Plague—he had introduced her to the family, and nobody became a member of this exclusive club without very strong recommendations. And for anyone to become a member they had also to be known personally to one other citizen.

On the Net, Plague was an intelligent and socially gifted citizen. In real life he was a severely overweight and socially challenged thirty-year-old living on disability benefits in Sundbyberg. He bathed too seldom and his apartment smelled like a monkey house. Salander visited him only once in a blue moon. She was content to confine her dealings with him to the Net.

As the chat continued, Wasp downloaded mail that had been sent to her private mailbox at Hacker Republic. One was from another member, Poison, and contained an improved version of her programme Asphyxia 1.3, which was available in the Republic’s archive for its citizens. Asphyxia was a programme that could control other people’s computers via the Internet. Poison said that he had used it successfully, and that his updated version included the latest versions of Unix, Apple, and Windows. She emailed him a brief reply and thanked him for the upgrade.

During the next hour, as evening approached in the United States, another half-dozen citizens had come online and welcomed back Wasp before joining the debate. When Salander logged off, the others were discussing to what extent the Swedish prime minister’s computer could be made to send civil but crazy emails to other heads of state. A working group had been formed to explore the matter. Salander logged off by writing a brief message:

Everyone sent her hugs and kisses and admonished her to keep the hole in her head warm.

Only when Salander had logged out of Hacker Republic did she go into Yahoo and log on to the private newsgroup [Idiotic_Table]. She discovered that the group had two members—herself and Blomkvist. The mailbox had one message, sent on May 15. It was titled [Read this first].

Salander thought for a moment. Don’t think so. A half-empty thermos of coffee, some apples, a change of clothes. No problem.

Salander had already discussed all of this with Giannini. She had told Giannini everything that had happened in Gosseberga, but she had refrained from telling her anything about Bjurman.

All of this she had already worked out for herself. The problem was that she didn’t know what she should do.

She opened the archive in [Idiotic_Table]. It contained twenty-six documents.