The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

thinking out loud.

“You don’t have much of a headache or any fever, so Dr Endrin is probably going to discharge you.” He stood up suddenly. “Thanks for talking to me. I’ll come back and see you before you’re transferred.”

He was already at the door when she spoke.

“Dr Jonasson?”

He turned towards her.

“Thank you.”

He nodded curtly once before he went out and locked the door.

Salander stared for a long time at the locked door. And then she lay back and stared up at the ceiling.

That was when she felt that there was something hard beneath her head. She lifted the pillow and saw to her surprise a small cloth bag that had definitely not been there before. She opened it and stared in amazement at a Palm Tungsten T3 hand-held computer and battery charger. Then she looked more closely at the computer and saw the little scratch on the top left corner. Her heart skipped a beat. It’s my Palm. But how… In amazement she glanced over at the locked door. Jonasson was a catalogue of surprises. In great excitement she turned on the computer at once and discovered that it was password-protected.

She stared in frustration at the blinking screen. It seemed to be challenging her. How the hell did they think I would… Then she looked in the cloth bag and found at the bottom a scrap of folded paper. She unfolded it and read a line written in an elegant script:

You’re the hacker, work it out! / Kalle B.

Salander laughed aloud for the first time in weeks. Touche. She thought for a few seconds. Then she picked up the stylus and wrote the number combination 9277, which corresponded to the letters W-A-S-P on the keyboard. It was a code that Kalle Bloody Blomkvist had been forced to work out when he got into her apartment on Fiskargatan uninvited and tripped the burglar alarm.

It did not work.

She tried 52553, which corresponded to the letters K-A-L–L-E.

That did not work either. Since Blomkvist presumably intended that she should use the computer, he must have chosen a simple password. He had used the signature Kalle, which normally he hated. She free-associated. She thought for a moment. It must be some insult. Then she typed in 74774, which corresponded to the word P- I-P-P-I – Pippi Bloody Longstocking.

The computer started up.

There was a smiley face on the screen with a cartoon speech balloon:

She found the document [Hi Sally] at the top of the list. She clicked on it and read:

First of all, this is only between you and me. Your lawyer, my sister Annika, has no idea that you have access to this computer. It has to stay that way.

I don’t know how much you understand of what is happening outside your locked room, but strangely enough (despite your personality), you have a number of loyal idiots working on your behalf. I have already established an elite body called The Knights of the Idiotic Table. We will be holding an annual dinner at which we’ll have fun talking crap about you. (No, you’re not invited.)

So, to the point. Annika is doing her best to prepare for your trial. One problem of course is that she’s working for you and is bound and fettered by one of those damned confidentiality oaths. So she can’t tell me what the two of you discuss, which in this case is a bit of a handicap. Luckily she does accept information.

We have to talk, you and I.

Don’t use my email.

I may be paranoid, but I have reason to suspect that I’m not the only one reading it. If you want to deliver something, go to Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]. I.D. Pippi and the password is p9i2p7p7i.

Mikael

Salander read his letter twice, staring in bewilderment at the Palm. After a period of computer celibacy, she was suffering from massive cyber-abstinence. And she wondered which big toe Blomkvist had been thinking with when he smuggled her a computer but forgot that she needed a mobile to connect to the Net.

She was still thinking when she heard footsteps in the corridor. She turned the computer off at once and shoved it under her pillow. As she heard the key in the door she realized that the cloth bag and charger were still in view on the bedside table. She reached out and slid the bag under the covers and pressed the coil of cord into her crotch. She lay passively looking up at the ceiling when the night nurse came in, said a polite hello, and asked how she was doing and whether she needed anything.

Salander told her that she was doing fine and that she wanted a pack of cigarettes. This request was turned down in a firm but friendly tone. She was given a pack of nicotine gum. As the nurse was closing the door Salander glimpsed the guard on his chair out in the corridor. She waited until she heard the nurse’s steps receding before she once again picked up her Palm.

She turned it on and searched for connectivity.

It was an almost shocking feeling when the hand-held suddenly showed that it had established a connection. Contact with the Net. Inconceivable.

She jumped out of bed so fast that she felt a pain in her injured hip. She looked around the room. How? She walked all the way round, examining every nook and cranny. No, there was no mobile in the room. And yet she had connectivity. Then a crooked grin spread across her face. The connection was radio-controlled and locked into a mobile via Bluetooth, which had a range of ten to twelve metres. Her eyes lit upon an air vent just below the ceiling.

Kalle Bloody Blomkvist had somehow planted a mobile just outside her room. That could be the only explanation.

But why not smuggle in the mobile too? Ah, of course. The batteries.

Her Palm had to be recharged only once every three days. A mobile that was connected, if she surfed it hard, would burn out its batteries in much less time. Blomkvist – or more likely somebody he had hired and who was out there – would have to change the batteries at regular intervals.

But he had sent in the charger for her Palm. He isn’t so stupid after all.

Salander began by deciding where to keep the hand-held. She had to find a hiding place. There were plug sockets by the door and in the panel behind the bed, which provided electricity for her bedside lamp and digital clock. There was a recess where a radio had been removed. She smiled. Both the battery charger and the Palm could fit in there. She could use the socket inside the bedside table to charge up the Palm during the day.

Salander was happy. Her heart was pounding hard when she started up the hand-held for the first time in two months and ventured on to the Internet.

Surfing on a Palm hand-held with a tiny screen and a stylus was not the same thing as surfing on a PowerBook with a 17” screen. But she was connected. From her bed at Sahlgrenska she could now reach the entire world.

She started by going on to a website that advertised rather uninteresting pictures by an unknown and not especially skilled amateur photographer called Gil Bates in Jobsville, Pennsylvania. Salander had once checked it out and confirmed that the town of Jobsville did not exist. Nevertheless, Bates had taken more than 200 photographs of the community and created a gallery of small thumbnails. She scrolled down to image 167 and clicked to enlarge it. It showed the church in Jobsville. She put her cursor on the spire of the church tower and clicked. She instantly got a pop-up dialog box that asked for her I.D. and password. She took out her stylus and wrote the word Remarkable on the screen as her I.D. and A (89)Cx#magnolia as the password.

She got a dialog box with the text [ERROR – you have the wrong password] and a button that said [OK – Try again]. Lisbeth knew that if she clicked on [OK – Try again] and tried a different password, she would get the same dialog box again – for years and years, for as long as she kept trying. Instead she clicked on the [O] in [ERROR].

The screen went blank. Then an animated door opened and a Lara Croft-like figure stepped out. A speech