The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

  "All right."

  "If you're a good boss, then you'll discuss any concerns with the others. First with Henry and Christer, then with me, and we'll raise any problems at the editorial meetings."

  "I'll do my best."

  "Good luck."

  He sat down on the sofa in the living room with his iBook on his lap and worked without any breaks all day. When he was finished, he had a rough draft of two articles totalling twenty-one pages focused on the deaths of Svensson and Johansson--what they were working on, why they were killed, and who the killer was. He estimated that he would have to produce twice as much text again for the summer issue. He also had to resolve how to profile Salander in the article without violating her trust. He knew things about her that she would never want published.

  Gullberg had a single slice of bread and a cup of black coffee in Freys cafe. Then he took a taxi to Artillerigatan in Ostermalm. At 9:15 he introduced himself on the entry phone and was buzzed inside. He took the elevator to the seventh floor, where he was received by Birger Wadensjoo, the new chief of the Section.

  Wadensjoo had been one of the latest recruits to the Section around the time Gullberg retired. He wished that the decisive Fredrik was still there. Clinton had succeeded Gullberg and was the chief of the Section until 2002, when diabetes and coronary artery disease had forced him into retirement. Gullberg did not have a clear sense of what Wadensjoo was made of.

  "Welcome, Evert," Wadensjoo said, shaking hands with his former chief. "It's good of you to take the time to come in."

  "Time is more or less all I have," Gullberg said.

  "You know how it goes. I wish we had the leisure to stay in touch with faithful old colleagues."

  Gullberg ignored the insinuation. He turned left into his old office and sat at the round conference table by the window. He assumed it was Wadensjoo who was responsible for the Chagall and Mondrian reproductions. In his day, plans of the warships Kronan and Wasa had hung on the walls. He had always dreamed about the sea, and he was in fact a naval officer, although he had spent only a few brief months at sea during his military service. There were computers now, but otherwise the room looked almost exactly as when he had left. Wadensjoo poured coffee.

  "The others are on their way," he said. "I thought we could have a few words first."

  "How many in the Section are still here from my day?"

  "Apart from me, only Otto Hallberg and Georg Nystrom. Hallberg is retiring this year, and Nystrom is turning sixty. Otherwise it's new recruits. You've probably met some of them before."

  "How many are working for the Section today?"

  "We've reorganized a bit."

  "And?"

  "There are seven full-timers. So we've cut back. But there's a total of thirty-one employees of the Section within SIS. Most of them never come here. They take care of their normal jobs and do some discreet moonlighting for us should the need or opportunity arise."

  "Thirty-one employees."

  "Plus the seven here. You were the one who created the system, after all. We've just fine-tuned it. Today we have what's called an internal and external organization. When we recruit somebody, they're given a leave of absence for a time to go to our school. Hallberg is in charge of training, which is six weeks for the basics. We do it out at the Naval School. Then they go back to their regular jobs in SIS, but now they work for us."

  "I see."

  "It's an excellent system. Most of our employees have no idea of the others' existence. And here in the Section we function principally as report recipients. The same rules apply as in your day. We have to be a single-level organization."

  "Do you have an operations unit?"

  Wadensjoo frowned. In Gullberg's day the Section had a small operations unit consisting of four people under the command of the shrewd Hans von Rottinger.

  "Well, not exactly. Von Rottinger died five years ago. We have a younger talent who does some field work, but usually we use someone from the external organization if necessary. Of course, things have become more complicated technically, for example when we need to arrange a telephone tap or enter an apartment. Nowadays there are alarms and other devices everywhere."

  Gullberg nodded. "Budget?"

  "About eleven million a year total. A third goes to salaries, a third to overheads, and a third to operations."

  "The budget has shrunk."

  "A little. But we have fewer people, which means that the operations budget has actually increased."

  "Tell me about our relationship to SIS."

  Wadensjoo shook his head. "The chief of Secretariat and the chief of Budget belong to us. Formally, the chief of Secretariat is the only one who has insight into our activities. We're so secret that we don't exist. But in practice, two assistant chiefs know of our existence. They do their best to ignore anything they hear about us."

  "Which means that if problems arise, the present SIS leadership will have an unpleasant surprise. What about the defence leadership and the government?"

  "We cut off the defence leadership some ten years ago. And governments come and go."

  "So if the shit hits the fan, we're on our own?"

  Wadensjoo nodded. "That's the drawback with this arrangement. The advantages are obvious. But our assignments have also changed. There's a new realpolitik in Europe since the Soviet Union collapsed. Our work is less and less about identifying spies. It's about terrorism, and about evaluating the political suitability of individuals in sensitive positions."

  "That's what it was always about."

  There was a knock at the door. Gullberg looked up to see a smartly dressed man of about sixty and a younger man in jeans and a tweed jacket.

  "Come in. . . . Evert Gullberg, this is Jonas Sandberg. He's been working here for four years and is in charge of operations. He's the one I told you about. And Georg Nystrom you know."

  "Hello, Georg," Gullberg said.

  They all shook hands. Then Gullberg turned to Sandberg.

  "So where do you come from?"

  "Most recently from Goteborg," Sandberg said lightly. "I went to see him."

  "Zalachenko?"

  Sandberg nodded.

  "Have a seat, gentlemen," Wadensjoo said.

  "Bjorck," Gullberg said, frowning when Wadensjoo lit a cigarillo. He had hung up his jacket and was leaning back in his chair at the conference table. Wadensjoo glanced at Gullberg and was struck by how thin the old man had become.

  "He was arrested for violation of the prostitution laws last Friday," Nystrom said. "The matter has gone to court, but in effect he confessed and slunk home with his tail between his legs. He lives out in Smadalaro, but he's on disability leave. The press hasn't picked up on it yet."

  "He was once one of the very best we had here in the Section," Gullberg said. "He played a key role in the Zalachenko affair. What's happened to him since I retired?"

  "Bjorck is probably one of the very few internal colleagues who left the Section and went back to external operations. He was out flitting around even in your day."

  "Well, I do recall he needed a little rest and wanted to expand his horizons. He was on leave of absence from the Section for two years in the eighties when he worked as intelligence attache. He had worked like a fiend with Zalachenko, practically around the clock from 1976 on, and I thought he needed a break. He was gone from 1985 to 1987, when he came back here."

  "You could say that he quit the Section in 1994 when he went over to the external organization. In 1996 he became assistant chief of the immigration division and ended up in a stressful position. His official duties took up a great deal of his time. Naturally he's stayed in contact with the Section throughout, and we had conversations with him about once a month until recently."

  "He's ill?"

  "It's nothing serious, but very painful. He has a slipped disk. He's had recurring trouble with it over the past few years. Two years ago he was on sick leave for four months. Then he was taken ill again in August last year. He was supposed
to start work again in January, but his sick leave was extended, and now it's a question of waiting for an operation."

  "And he spent his sick leave running around with prostitutes?" Gullberg said.

  "Yes. He's not married, and his dealings with whores appear to have been going on for many years, if I've understood correctly," said Sandberg, who had been silent for almost half an hour. "I've read Dag Svensson's manuscript."

  "I see. But can anyone explain to me what actually happened?"

  "As far as we can tell, it was Bjorck who initiated this whole mess. How else can we explain the report from 1991 ending up in the hands of Advokat Bjurman?"

  "Another man who spends his time with prostitutes?" Gullberg said.

  "Not as far as we know, and he wasn't mentioned in Svensson's material. He was, however, Lisbeth Salander's guardian."

  Wadensjoo sighed. "You could say it was my fault. You and Bjorck arrested Salander in 1991, when she was sent to the psychiatric hospital. We expected her to be away for much longer, but she became acquainted with a lawyer, Holger Palmgren, who managed to spring her loose. She was then placed with a foster family. By that time you had retired."

  "And then what happened?"

  "We kept an eye on her. In the meantime her twin sister, Camilla, was placed in a foster home in Uppsala. When they were seventeen, Lisbeth started digging into her past. She was looking for Zalachenko, and she went through every public registry she could find. Somehow--we're not sure how it happened--she came to the conclusion that her sister knew where Zalachenko was."

  "Was it true?"

  Wadensjoo shrugged. "I have no idea. The sisters had not seen each other for several years when Lisbeth Salander confronted Camilla and tried to persuade her to tell her what she knew. It ended in a violent argument and a spectacular fight between the sisters."

  "Then what?"

  "We kept close track of Lisbeth during those months. We had also informed Camilla that her sister was violent and mentally ill. She was the one who got in touch with us after Lisbeth's unexpected visit, and thereafter we increased our surveillance of her."

  "The sister was your informant?"

  "Camilla was mortally afraid of her sister. Lisbeth had aroused attention in other quarters as well. She had several run-ins with people from the social welfare agency, and in our estimation she still represented a threat to Zalachenko's anonymity. Then there was the incident in the tunnelbana."

  "She attacked a paedophile--"

  "Precisely. She was obviously prone to violence, and mentally disturbed. We thought that it would be best for all concerned if she disappeared into some institution again and availed herself of the opportunities there, so to speak. Clinton and von Rottinger were the ones who took the lead. They engaged the psychiatrist Teleborian again and through a representative filed a request in the district court to get her institutionalized for a second time. Palmgren stood up for Salander, and against all odds the court decided to follow his recommendation--so long as she was placed under guardianship."

  "But how did Bjurman get involved?"

  "Palmgren had a stroke in the fall of 2002. We still flag Salander for monitoring whenever she turns up in any database, and I saw to it that Bjurman became her new guardian. Bear in mind that he had no clue she was Zalachenko's daughter. The brief was simply for Bjurman to sound the alarm if she started blabbing about Zalachenko."

  "Bjurman was an idiot. He should never have been allowed to have anything to do with Zalachenko, even less with his daughter." Gullberg looked at Wadensjoo. "That was a serious mistake."

  "I know," Wadensjoo said. "But he seemed the right choice at the time. I never would have dreamed that--"

  "Where's the sister today? Camilla Salander."

  "We don't know. When she was nineteen she packed her bag and ran away from her foster family. We haven't heard a peep out of her since."

  "Go on."

  "I have a man in the regular police who has spoken with Prosecutor Ekstrom," Sandberg said. "The officer running the investigation, Inspector Bublanski, thinks that Bjurman raped Salander."

  Gullberg looked at Sandberg with astonishment.

  "Raped her?" he said.

  "Bjurman had a tattoo across his belly which read 'I am a sadistic pig, a pervert, and a rapist.'"

  Sandberg put a colour photograph from the autopsy on the table. Gullberg stared at it with distaste.

  "Zalachenko's daughter is supposed to have given him that?"

  "It's hard to find another explanation. And she's not known for being a shrinking violet. She kicked the shit out of two thugs from Svavelsjo MC."

  "Zalachenko's daughter," Gullberg repeated. He turned to Wadensjoo. "You know what? I think you ought to recruit her for the Section."

  Wadensjoo looked so startled that Gullberg had to explain that he was joking.

  "OK. Let's take it as a working hypothesis that Bjurman raped her and she somehow took her revenge. What else?"

  "The only one who could tell us exactly what happened, of course, is Bjurman, and he's dead. But the thing is, he shouldn't have had a clue that she was Zalachenko's daughter; it's not in any public records. But somehow, somewhere along the way, Bjurman discovered the connection."

  "But, Goddamnit, Wadensjoo! She knew who her father was and could have told Bjurman at any time."

  "I know. We . . . that is, I simply wasn't thinking straight."

  "That is unforgivably incompetent," Gullberg said.

  "I've kicked myself a hundred times about it. But Bjurman was one of the very few people who knew of Zalachenko's existence, and my thought was that it would be better if he rather than some other unknown guardian discovered she was Zalachenko's daughter. She could have told anyone."

  Gullberg pulled on his earlobe. "All right. Continue."

  "It's all hypothetical," Nystrom said. "But our supposition is that Bjurman assaulted Salander and that she struck back and did that." He pointed at the tattoo in the autopsy photograph.

  "Her father's daughter," Gullberg said. There was more than a trace of admiration in his voice.

  "With the result that Bjurman made contact with Zalachenko, hoping to get rid of the daughter. As we know, Zalachenko had good reason to hate the girl. And he gave the contract to Svavelsjo MC and this Niedermann that he hangs out with."

  "But how did Bjurman get in touch--" Gullberg fell silent. The answer was obvious.

  "Bjorck," Wadensjoo said. "Bjorck gave him the contact."

  "Damn," Gullberg said.

  In the morning two nurses came to change her bed linen. They found the pencil.

  "Oops. How did this get here?" one of them said, putting the pencil in her pocket. Salander looked at her with murder in her eyes.

  She was once more without a weapon, but she was too weak to protest.

  Her headache was unbearable, and she was given strong painkillers. Her left shoulder stabbed like a knife if she moved carelessly or tried to shift her weight. She lay on her back with the brace around her neck. It was supposed to be left on for a few more days, until the wound in her head began to heal. This morning she had a temperature of 102. Dr. Endrin could tell that there was an infection. Salander didn't need a thermometer to work that out.

  She realized that once again she was confined to an institutional bed, even though this time there was no strap holding her down. That would have been unnecessary. She couldn't sit up, let alone leave the room.

  At lunchtime on Monday she had a visit from Dr. Jonasson.

  "Hello. Do you remember me?"

  She shook her head.

  "I was the one who woke you after surgery. I operated on you. I just wanted to hear how you're doing and if everything is going well."

  Salander looked at him, her eyes wide. It should have been obvious that everything was not going well.

  "I heard you took off your neck brace last night."

  She acknowledged as much with her eyes.

  "We put the neck brace on for a reason--you have
to keep your head still for the healing process to get started." He looked at the silent girl. "OK," he said at last. "I just wanted to check on you."

  He was at the door when he heard her voice.

  "It's Jonasson, right?"

  He turned and smiled at her in surprise. "That's right. If you remember my name, then you must have been more alert than I thought."

  "And you were the one who operated to remove the bullet?"

  "That's right."

  "Please tell me how I'm doing. I can't get a sensible answer from anyone."

  He went back to her bedside and looked her in the eye.

  "You were lucky. You were shot in the head, but the bullet did not, I believe, injure any vital areas. The risk is that you could have bleeding in your brain. That's why we want you to stay still. You also have an infection. The wound in your shoulder seems to be the cause. It's possible that you'll need another operation--on your shoulder--if we can't arrest the infection with antibiotics. You're going to have some painful times ahead while your body heals. But as things look now, I'm optimistic that you'll make a full recovery."

  "Can this cause brain damage?"

  He hesitated before nodding. "Yes, there is that possibility. But all signs indicate that you made it through fine. There's also a possibility that you'll develop scar tissue in your brain, which might cause trouble . . . for instance, you might develop epilepsy or some other problem. But to be honest, it's all speculation. Right now, things look good. You're healing. And if problems crop up along the way, we'll deal with them. Is that a clear enough answer?"

  She shut her eyes to say yes. "How long do I have to lie here like this?"

  "You mean in the hospital? It will be at least a couple of weeks before we can let you go."

  "No, I mean how long before I can get up and start walking and moving around?"

  "That depends on how the healing progresses. But count on two weeks before we can start you on some sort of physical therapy."

  She gave him a long look. "You wouldn't happen to have a cigarette, would you?" she said.

  Dr. Jonasson burst out laughing and shook his head. "Sorry. There's no smoking allowed in the hospital. But I can see to it that you get a nicotine patch or some gum."