The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

Teleborian had indeed had dealings with S.I.S.

She put down the report and focused her attention on other aspects of the information that Edklinth had given her. She studied the photographs of the two men who had allegedly followed the journalist Blomkvist from Cafe Copacabana on May 1.

She consulted the vehicle register and found that Goran Martensson was the owner of a grey Volvo with the registration number legible in the photographs. Then she got confirmation from the S.I.S. personnel department that he was employed there. Her heart sank again.

Martensson worked in Personal Protection. He was a bodyguard. He was one of the officers responsible on formal occasions for the safety of the Prime Minister. For the past few weeks he had been loaned to Counter- Espionage. His leave of absence had begun on April 10, a couple of days after Zalachenko and Salander had landed in Sahlgrenska hospital. But that sort of temporary reassignment was not unusual – covering a shortage of personnel here or there in an emergency situation.

Then Figuerola called the assistant chief of Counter-Espionage, a man she knew and had worked for during her short time in that department. Was Goran Martensson working on anything important, or could he be borrowed for an investigation in Constitutional Protection?

The assistant chief of Counter-Espionage was puzzled. Inspector Figuerola must have been misinformed. Martensson had not been reassigned to Counter-Espionage. Sorry.

Figuerola stared at her receiver for two minutes. In Personal Protection they believed that Martensson had been loaned out to Counter-Espionage. Counter-Espionage said that they definitely had not borrowed him. Transfers of that kind had to be approved by the chief of Secretariat. She reached for the telephone to call him, but stopped short. If Personal Protection had loaned out Martensson, then the chief of Secretariat must have approved the decision. But Martensson was not at Counter-Espionage, which the chief of Secretariat must be aware of. And if Martensson was loaned out to some department that was tailing journalists, then the chief of Secretariat would have to know about that too.

Edklinth had told her: no rings in the water. To raise the matter with the chief of Secretariat might be to chuck a very large stone into a pond.

Berger sat at her desk in the glass cage. It was 10.30 on Monday morning. She badly needed the cup of coffee she had just got from the machine in the canteen. The first hours of her workday had been taken up entirely with meetings, starting with one lasting fifteen minutes in which Assistant Editor Fredriksson presented the guidelines for the day’s work. She was increasingly dependent on Fredriksson’s judgement in the light of her loss of confidence in Anders Holm.

The second was an hour-long meeting with the chairman Magnus Borgsjo, S.M.P.’s C.F.O. Christer Sellberg, and Ulf Flodin, the budget chief. The discussion was about the slump in advertising and the downturn in single-copy sales. The budget chief and the C.F.O. were both determined on action to cut the newspaper’s overheads.

“We made it through the first quarter of this year thanks to a marginal rise in advertising sales and the fact that two senior, highly paid employees retired at the beginning of the year. Those positions have not been filled,” Flodin said. “We’ll probably close out the present quarter with a small deficit. But the free papers, Metro and Stockholm City, are cutting into our ad. revenue in Stockholm. My prognosis is that the third quarter will produce a significant loss.”

“So how do we counter that?” Borgsjo said.

“The only option is cutbacks. We haven’t laid anyone off since 2002. But before the end of the year we will have to eliminate ten positions.”

“Which positions?” Berger said.

“We need to work on the ‘cheese plane’ principle, shave a job here and a job there. The sports desk has six and a half jobs at the moment. We should cut that to five full-timers.”

“As I understand it, the sports desk is on its knees already. What you’re proposing means that we’ll have to cut back on sports coverage.”

Flodin shrugged. “I’ll gladly listen to other suggestions.”

“I don’t have any better suggestions, but the principle is this: if we cut personnel, then we have to produce a smaller newspaper, and if we make a smaller newspaper, the number of readers will drop and the number of advertisers too.”

“The eternal vicious circle,” Sellberg said.

“I was hired to turn this downward trend around,” said Berger. “I see my job as taking an aggressive approach to change the newspaper and make it more attractive to readers. I can’t do that if I have to cut staff.” She turned to Borgsjo. “How long can the paper continue to bleed? How big a deficit can we take before we hit the limit?”

Borgsjo pursed his lips. “Since the early ’90s S.M.P. has eaten into a great many old consolidated assets. We have a stock portfolio that has dropped in value by about 30 per cent compared to ten years ago. A large portion of these funds were used for investments in I.T. We’ve also had enormous expenses.”

“I gather that S.M.P. has developed its own text editing system, the A.X.T. What did that cost?”

“About five million kronor to develop.”

“Why did S.M.P. go to the trouble of developing its own software? There are inexpensive commercial programs already on the market.”

“Well, Erika… that may be true. Our former I.T. chief talked us into it. He persuaded us that it would be less expensive in the long run, and that S.M.P. would also be able to license the program to other newspapers.”

“And did any of them buy it?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, a local paper in Norway bought it.”

“Meanwhile,” Berger said in a dry voice, “we’re sitting here with P.C.s that are five or six years old…”

“It’s simply out of the question that we invest in new computers in the coming year,” Flodin said.

The discussion had gone back and forth. Berger was aware that her objections were being systematically stonewalled by Flodin and Sellberg. For them costcutting was what counted, which was understandable enough from the point of view of a budget chief and a C.F.O., but unacceptable for a newly appointed editor-in-chief. What irritated her most was that they kept brushing off her arguments with patronizing smiles, making her feel like a teenager being quizzed on her homework. Without actually uttering a single inappropriate word, they displayed towards her an attitude that was so antediluvian it was almost comical. You shouldn’t worry your pretty head over complex matters, little girl.

Borgsjo was not much help. He was biding his time and letting the other participants at the meeting say their piece, but she did not sense the same condescension from him.

She sighed and plugged in her laptop. She had nineteen new messages. Four were spam. Someone wanted to sell her Viagra, cybersex with “The Sexiest Lolitas on the Net” for only $4.00 per minute, “Animal Sex, the Juiciest Horse Fuck in the Universe,” and a subscription to fashion.nu. The tide of this crap never receded, no matter how many times she tried to block it. Another seven messages were those so- called “Nigeria letters” from the widow of the former head of a bank in Abu Dhabi offering her ludicrous sums of money if she would only assist with a small sum of start-up money, and other such drivel.

There was the morning memo, the lunchtime memo, three emails from Fredriksson updating her on developments in the day’s lead story, one from her accountant who wanted a meeting to check on the implications of her move from Millennium to S.M.P., and a message from her dental hygienist suggesting a time for her quarterly visit. She put the appointment in her calendar and realized at once that she would have to change it because she had a major editorial conference planned for that day.

Finally she opened the last one, sent from [email protected]› with the subject line [Attn: Editor-in- Chief]. Slowly she put down her coffee cup.

YOU WHORE! YOU THINK YOU’RE SOMETHING YOU FUCKING CUNT. DON’T THINK YOU CAN COME HERE AND THROW YOUR WEIGHT AROUND. YOU’RE GOING TO GET FUCKED IN THE CUNT WITH A SCREWDRIVER,