The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

“How are you feeling?” Berger said.

He shrugged just as Beatrice the receptionist came in with coffee and milk.

“It feels as though I’m already operating at half speed. Actually I don’t want to talk about it. You walk around feeling like a teenager and immortal your whole life, and suddenly there isn’t much time left. But one thing is for sure – I don’t mean to spend the rest of it in this glass cage.”

He rubbed his chest. He had heart and artery problems, which was the reason for his going and why Berger was to start several months earlier than originally announced.

Berger turned and looked out over the landscape of the newsroom. She saw a reporter and a photographer heading for the lift, perhaps on their way to cover the May Day parade.

“Hakan… if I’m being a nuisance or if you’re busy today, I’ll come back tomorrow or the day after.”

“Today’s task is to write an editorial on the demonstrations. I could do it in my sleep. If the pinkos want to start a war with Denmark, then I have to explain why they’re wrong. If the pinkos want to avoid a war with Denmark, I have to explain why they’re wrong.”

“Denmark?”

“Correct. The message on May Day has to touch on the immigrant integration question. The pinkos, of course, no matter what they say, are wrong.”

He burst out laughing.

“Always so cynical?”

“Welcome to S.M.P.”

Erika had never had an opinion about Morander. He was an anonymous power figure among the elite of editors-in-chief. In his editorials he came across as boring and conservative. Expert in complaining about taxes, and a typical libertarian when it came to freedom of the press. But she had never met him in person.

“Do you have time to tell me about the job?”

“I’m gone at the end of June. We’ll work side by side for two months. You’ll discover positive things and negative things. I’m a cynic, so mostly I see the negative things.”

He got up and stood next to her to look through the glass at the newsroom.

“You’ll discover that – it comes with the job – you’re going to have a number of adversaries out there – daily editors and veterans among the editors who have created their own little empires. They have their own club that you can’t join. They’ll try to stretch the boundaries, to push through their own headlines and angles. You’ll have to fight hard to hold your own.”

Berger nodded.

“Your night editors are Billinger and Karlsson… they’re a whole chapter unto themselves. They hate each other and, importantly, they don’t work the same shift, but they both act as if they’re publishers and editors-in- chief. Then there’s Anders Holm, the news editor – you’ll be working with him a lot. You’ll have your share of clashes with him. In point of fact, he’s the one who gets S.M.P. out every day. Some of the reporters are prize primadonnas, and some of them should really be put out to grass.”

“Have you got any good colleagues?”

Morander laughed again.

“Oh yes, but you’re going to have to decide for yourself which ones you can get along with. Some of the reporters out there are seriously good.”

“How about management?”

“Magnus Borgsjo is chairman of the board. He was the one who recruited you. He’s charming. A bit old school and yet at the same time a bit of a reformer, but he’s above all the one who makes the decisions. Some of the board members, including several from the family which owns the paper, mostly seem to sit and kill time, while others flutter around, professional board-member types.”

“You don’t seem to be exactly enamoured of your board.”

“There’s a division of labour. We put out the paper. They take care of the finances. They’re not supposed to interfere with the content, but situations do crop up. To be honest, Erika, between the two of us, this is going to be tough.”

“Why’s that?”

“Circulation has dropped by nearly 150,000 copies since the glory days of the ’60s, and there may soon come a time when S.M.P. is no longer profitable. We’ve reorganized, cut more than 180 jobs since 1980. We went over to tabloid format – which we should have done twenty years sooner. S.M.P. is still one of the big papers, but it wouldn’t take much for us to be regarded as a second-class paper. If it hasn’t already happened.”

“Why did they pick me then?” Berger said.

“Because the median age of our readers is fifty-plus, and the growth in readers in their twenties is almost zero. The paper has to be rejuvenated. And the reasoning among the board was to bring in the most improbable editor-in-chief they could think of.”

“A woman?”

“Not just any woman. The woman who crushed Wennerstrom’s empire, who is considered the queen of investigative journalism, and who has a reputation for being the toughest. Picture it. It’s irresistible. If you can’t rejuvenate this paper, nobody can. S.M.P. isn’t just hiring Erika Berger, we’re hiring the whole mystique that goes with your name.”

When Blomkvist left Cafe Copacabana next to the Kvarter cinema at Hornstull, it was just past 2.00 p.m. He put on his dark glasses and turned up Bergsundsstrand on his way to the tunnelbana. He noticed the grey Volvo at once, parked at the corner. He passed it without slowing down. Same registration, and the car was empty.

It was the seventh time he had seen the same car in four days. He had no idea how long the car had been in his neighbourhood. It was pure chance that he had noticed it at all. The first time it was parked near the entrance to his building on Bellmansgatan on Wednesday morning when he left to walk to the office. He happened to read the registration number, which began with KAB, and he paid attention because those were the initials of Zalachenko’s holding company, Karl Axel Bodin Inc. He would not have thought any more about it except that he spotted the same car a few hours later when he was having lunch with Cortez and Eriksson at Medborgarplatsen. That time the Volvo was parked on a side street near the Millennium offices.

He wondered whether he was becoming paranoid, but when he visited Palmgren the same afternoon at the rehabilitation home in Ersta, the car was in the visitors’ car park. That could not have been chance. Blomkvist began to keep an eye on everything around him. And when he saw the car again the next morning he was not surprised.

Not once had he seen its driver.

A call to the national vehicle register revealed that the car belonged to a Goran Martensson of Vittangigaten in Vallingby. An hour’s research turned up the information that Martensson held the title of business consultant and owned a private company whose address was a P.O. box on Fleminggatan in Kungsholmen. Martensson’s C.V. was an interesting one. In 1983, at eighteen, he had done his military service with the coast guard, and then enrolled in the army. By 1989 he had advanced to lieutenant, and then he switched to study at the police academy in Solna. Between 1991 and 1996 he worked for the Stockholm police. In 1997 he was no longer on the official roster of the external service, and in 1999 he had registered his own company.

So – Sapo.

An industrious investigative journalist could get paranoid on less than this. Blomkvist concluded that he was under surveillance, but it was being carried out so clumsily that he could hardly have helped but notice.

Or was it clumsy? The only reason he first noticed the car was the registration number, which just happened to mean something to him. But for the KAB, he would not have given the car a second glance.

On Friday KAB was conspicuous by its absence. Blomkvist could not be absolutely sure, but he thought he had been tailed by a red Audi that day. He had not managed to catch the registration number. On Friday the Volvo was back.

Exactly twenty seconds after Blomkvist left Cafe Copacabana, Malm raised his Nikon in the shadows of Cafe Rosso’s awning across the street and took a series of twelve photographs of the two men who followed Blomkvist