The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

Zalachenko stood in the doorway for two minutes without moving. Then gingerly he closed the door.

She heard the faint scraping of the crutches as he quietly retreated down the corridor.

Five minutes later she propped herself up on her right elbow, reached for the glass, and took a long drink of water. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pulled the electrodes off her arms and chest. With an effort she stood up and swayed unsteadily. It took her about a minute to gain control over her body. She hobbled to the door and leaned against the wall to catch her breath. She was in a cold sweat. Then she turned icy with rage.

Fuck you, Zalachenko. Let’s end this right here and now.

She needed a weapon.

The next moment she heard quick heels clacking in the corridor.

Shit. The electrodes.

“What in God’s name are you doing up?” the night nurse said.

“I had to… go… to the toilet,” Salander said breathlessly.

“Get back into bed at once.”

She took Salander’s hand and helped her into the bed. Then she got a bedpan.

“When you have to go to the toilet, just ring for us. That’s what this button is for.”

Blomkvist woke up at 10.30 on Tuesday, showered, put on coffee, and then sat down with his iBook. After the meeting at Milton Security the previous evening, he had come home and worked until 5.00 a.m. The story was beginning at last to take shape. Zalachenko’s biography was still vague – all he had was what he had blackmailed Bjorck to reveal, as well as the handful of details Palmgren had been able to provide. Salander’s story was pretty much done. He explained step by step how she had been targeted by a gang of Cold-Warmongers at S.I.S. and locked away in a psychiatric hospital to stop her blowing the gaff on Zalachenko.

He was pleased with what he had written. There were still some holes that he would have to fill, but he knew that he had one hell of a story. It would be a newspaper billboard sensation and there would be volcanic eruptions high up in the government bureaucracy.

He smoked a cigarette while he thought.

He could see two particular gaps that needed attention. One was manageable. He had to deal with Teleborian, and he was looking forward to that assignment. When he was finished with him, the renowned children’s psychiatrist would be one of the most detested men in Sweden. That was one thing.

The second thing was more complicated.

The men who conspired against Salander – he thought of them as the Zalachenko club – were inside the Security Police. He knew one, Gunnar Bjorck, but Bjorck could not possibly be the only man responsible. There had to be a group… a division or unit of some sort. There must be chiefs, operations managers. There had to be a budget. But he had no idea how to go about identifying these people, where even to start. He had only the vaguest notion of how Sapo was organized.

On Monday he had begun his research by sending Cortez to the second-hand bookshops on Sodermalm, to buy every book which in any way dealt with the Security Police. Cortez had come to his apartment in the afternoon with six books.

Espionage in Sweden by Mikael Rosquist (Tempus, 1988); Sapo Chief 1962–1970 by P.G. Vinge (Wahlstrom&Widstrand, 1988); Secret Forces by Jan Ottosson and Lars Magnusson (Tiden, 1991); Power Struggle for Sapo by Erik Magnusson (Corona, 1989); An Assignment by Carl Lidbom (Wahlstrom&Widstrand, 1990); and – somewhat surprisingly – An Agent in Place by Thomas Whiteside (Ballantine, 1966), which dealt with the Wennerstrom affair. The Wennerstrom affair of the ’60s, not Blomkvist’s own much more recent Wennerstrom affair.

He had spent much of Monday night and the early hours of Tuesday morning reading or at least skimming the books. When he had finished he made some observations. First, most of the books published about the Security Police were from the late ’80s. An Internet search showed that there was hardly any current literature on the subject.

Second, there did not seem to be any intelligible basic overview of the activities of the Swedish secret police over the years. This may have been because many documents were stamped Top Secret and were therefore off limits, but there did not seem to be any single institution, researcher or media that had carried out a critical examination of Sapo.

He also noticed another odd thing: there was no bibliography in any one of the books Cortez had found. On the other hand, the footnotes often referred to articles in the evening newspapers, or to interviews with some old, retired Sapo hand.

The book Secret Forces was fascinating but largely dealt with the time before and during the Second World War. Blomkvist regarded P.G. Vinge’s memoir as propaganda, written in self-defence by a severely criticized Sapo chief who was eventually fired. An Agent in Place contained so much inaccurate information about Sweden in the first chapter that he threw the book into the wastepaper basket. The only two books with any real ambition to portray the work of the Security Police were Power Struggle for Sapo and Espionage in Sweden. They contained data, names and organizational charts. He found Magnusson’s book to be especially worthwhile reading. Even though it did not offer any answers to his immediate questions, it provided a good account of Sapo as a structure as well as its primary concerns over several decades.

The biggest surprise was Lidbom’s An Assignment, which described the problems encountered by the former Swedish ambassador to France when he was commissioned to examine Sapo in the wake of the Palme assassination and the Ebbe Carlsson affair. Blomkvist had never before read anything by Lidbom, and he was taken aback by the sarcastic tone combined with razor-sharp observations. But even Lidbom’s book brought Blomkvist no closer to an answer to his questions, even if he was beginning to get an idea of what he was up against.

He opened his mobile and called Cortez.

“Hi, Henry. Thanks for the legwork yesterday.”

“What do you need now?”

“A little more legwork.”

“Micke, I hate to say this, but I have a job to do. I’m editorial assistant now.”

“An excellent career advancement.”

“What is it you want?”

“Over the years there have been a number of public reports on Sapo. Carl Lidbom did one. There must be several others like it.”

“I see.”

“Order everything you can find from parliament: budgets, public reports, interpellations, and the like. And get Sapo’s annual reports as far back as you can find them.”

“Yes, master.”

“Good man. And, Henry…”

“Yes?”

“I don’t need them until tomorrow.”

Salander spent the whole day brooding about Zalachenko. She knew that he was only two doors away, that he wandered in the corridors at night, and that he had come to her room at 3.10 this morning.

She had tracked him to Gosseberga fully intending to kill him. She had failed, with the result that Zalachenko was alive and tucked up in bed barely ten metres from where she was. And she was in hot water. She could not tell how bad the situation was, but she supposed that she would have to escape and discreetly disappear abroad herself if she did not want to risk being locked up in some nuthouse again with Teleborian as her warder.

The problem was that she could scarcely sit upright in bed. She did notice improvements. The headache was still there, but it came in waves instead of being constant. The pain in her left shoulder had subsided a bit, but it resurfaced whenever she tried to move.