The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

out of the cafe and past the Kvarter cinema.

One of the men looked to be in his late thirties or early forties and had blond hair. The other seemed a bit older, with thinning reddish-blond hair and sunglasses. Both were dressed in jeans and leather jackets.

They parted company at the grey Volvo. The older man got in, and the younger one followed Blomkvist towards Hornstull tunnelbana station.

Malm lowered the camera. Blomkvist had given him no good reason for insisting that he patrol the neighbourhood near the Copacabana on Sunday afternoon looking for a grey Volvo with a registration beginning KAB. Blomkvist told him to position himself where he could photograph whoever got into the car, probably just after 3.00. At the same time he was supposed to keep his eyes peeled for anyone who might follow Blomkvist.

It sounded like the prelude to a typical Blomkvist adventure. Malm was never quite sure whether Blomkvist was paranoid by nature or if he had paranormal gifts. Since the events in Gosseberga his colleague had certainly become withdrawn and hard to communicate with. Nothing unusual about this, though. But when Blomkvist was working on a complicated story – Malm had observed the same obsessive and secretive behaviour in the weeks before the Wennerstrom story broke – it became more pronounced.

On the other hand, Malm could see for himself that Blomkvist was indeed being tailed. He wondered vaguely what new nightmare was in the offing. Whatever it was, it would soak up all of Millennium’s time, energy and resources. Malm did not think it was a great idea for Blomkvist to set off on some wild scheme just when the magazine’s editor-in-chief had deserted to the Big Daily, and now Millennium’s laboriously reconstructed stability was suddenly hanging once again in the balance.

But Malm had not participated in any parade – apart from Gay Pride – in at least ten years. He had nothing better to do on this May Day Sunday than humour his wayward publisher. He sauntered after the man tailing Blomkvist even though he had not been instructed to do so, but he lost sight him on Langholmsgatan.

One of the first things Blomkvist did when he realized that his mobile was bugged was to send Cortez out to buy some used handsets. Cortez bought a job lot of Ericsson T10s for a song. Blomkvist then opened some anonymous cash-card accounts on Comviq and distributed the mobiles to Eriksson, Cortez, Giannini, Malm and Armansky, also keeping one for himself. They were to be used only for conversations that absolutely must not be overheard. Day-to-day stuff they could and should do on their own mobiles. Which meant that they all had to carry two mobiles with them.

Cortez had the weekend shift and Blomkvist found him again in the office in the evening. Since the murder of Zalachenko, Blomkvist had devised a 24/7 roster, so that Millennium’s office was always staffed and someone slept there every night. The roster included himself, Cortez, Eriksson and Malm. Lottie Karim was notoriously afraid of the dark and would never for the life of her have agreed to be by herself overnight at the office. Nilsson was not afraid of the dark, but she worked so furiously on her projects that she was encouraged to go home when the day was done. Magnusson was getting on in years and as advertising manager had nothing to do with the editorial side. He was also about to go on holiday.

“Anything new?”

“Nothing special,” Cortez said. “Today is all about May 1, naturally enough.”

“I’m going to be here for a couple of hours,” Blomkvist told him. “Take a break and come back around 9.00.”

After Cortez left, Blomkvist got out his anonymous mobile and called Daniel Olsson, a freelance journalist in Goteborg. Over the years Millennium had published several of his articles and Blomkvist had great faith in his ability to gather background material.

“Hi, Daniel. Mikael Blomkvist here. Can you talk?”

“Sure.”

“I need someone for a research job. You can bill us for five days, and you don’t have to produce an article at the end of it. Well, you can write an article on the subject if you want and we’ll publish it, but it’s the research we’re after.”

“Fine. Tell me.”

“It’s sensitive. You can’t discuss this with anyone except me, and you can communicate with me only via hotmail. You must not even mention that you’re doing research for Millennium.”

“This sounds fun. What are you looking for?”

“I want you to do a workplace report on Sahlgrenska hospital. We’re calling the report ‘E.R.’, and it’s to look at the differences between reality and the T.V. series. I want you to go to the hospital and observe the work in the emergency ward and the intensive care unit for a couple of days. Talk with doctors, nurses and cleaners – everybody who works there in fact. What are their working conditions like? What do they actually do? That sort of stuff. Photographs too, of course.”

“Intensive care?” Olsson said.

“Exactly. I want you to focus on the follow-up care given to severely injured patients in corridor 11C. I want to know the whole layout of the corridor, who works there, what they look like, and what sort of background they have.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, a certain Lisbeth Salander is a patient on 11C.”

Olsson was not born yesterday.

“How interesting,” Blomkvist said. “Find out which room she’s in, who’s in the neighbouring rooms, and what the routines are in that section.”

“I have a feeling that this story is going to be about something altogether different,” Olsson said.

“As I said… all I want is the research you come up with.”

They exchanged hotmail addresses.

Salander was lying on her back on the floor when Nurse Marianne came in.

“Hmm,” she said, thereby indicating her doubts about the wisdom of this style of conduct in the intensive care unit. But it was, she accepted, her patient’s only exercise space.

Salander was sweating. She had spent thirty minutes trying to do arm lifts, stretches and sit-ups on the recommendation of her physiotherapist. She had a long list of the movements she was to perform each day to strengthen the muscles in her shoulder and hip in the wake of her operation three weeks earlier. She was breathing hard and felt wretchedly out of shape. She tired easily and her left shoulder was tight and hurt at the very least effort. But she was on the path to recovery. The headaches that had tormented her after surgery had subsided and came back only sporadically.

She realized that she was sufficiently recovered now that she could have walked out of the hospital, or at any rate hobbled out, if that had been possible, but it was not. First of all, the doctors had not yet declared her fit, and second, the door to her room was always locked and guarded by a fucking hit-man from Securitas, who sat on his chair in the corridor.

She was healthy enough to be moved to a normal rehabilitation ward, but after going back and forth about this, the police and hospital administration had agreed that Salander should remain in room eighteen for the time being. The room was easier to guard, there was round-the-clock staff close by, and the room was at the end of an L-shaped corridor. And in corridor 11C the staff were security-conscious after the killing of Zalachenko; they were familiar with her situation. Better not to move her to a new ward with new routines.

Her stay at Sahlgrenska was in any case going to come to an end in a few more weeks. As soon as the doctors discharged her, she would be transferred to Kronoberg prison in Stockholm to await trial. And the person who would decide when it was time for that was Dr Jonasson.

It was ten days after the shooting in Gosseberga before Dr Jonasson gave permission for the police to conduct their first real interview, which Giannini viewed as being to Salander’s advantage. Unfortunately Dr Jonasson had made it difficult even for Giannini to have access to her client, and that was annoying.

After the tumult of Zalachenko’s murder and Gullberg’s attempted suicide, he had done an evaluation of Salander’s condition. He took into account that Salander must be under a great deal of stress for having been suspected of three murders plus a damn-near fatal assault on her late father. Jonasson had no idea whether she was guilty or innocent, and as a doctor he was not the least bit interested in the answer to that question. He simply concluded that Salander was suffering from stress, that she had been shot three times, and that one bullet