Zalachenko. Blomkvist supposed that she had not planned to come back. He had used her system disks to restore her computer to a functioning state.
Since April he had not even plugged in the broadband cable to his own machine. He logged on to her broadband connection, started up the I.C.Q. chat program, and pinged up the address she had created for him through the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table].
– Hi, Sally.
– You say.
– I've reworked the two chapters we've been talking the other day. You've got the new version on Yahoo. What about your part?
– I have completed seventeen pages. Climb right now on the Idiotic Table.
Ping.
– Okay. Got it. Let me read it and then we'll talk.
– Another thing.
– What?
– I've created another forum on Yahoo called 'The Knights'.
Blomkvist smiled.
– Okay. The Knights of the Idiotic Table.
– Password: yacaracaI2.
– Agreed.
– Four members: you, me, Plague and Trinity.
– Your mysterious online friends.
– Just in case.
– Okay.
– Plague has copied information from the computer of the prosecutor Ekstrom. The pirated in April.
– Okay.
– If I lose my Palm, he will keep you informed.
– Okay. Thank you.
Blomkvist logged in to I.C.Q. and went into the newly created Yahoo group [The_Knights]. All he found was a link from Plague to an anonymous U.R.L. which consisted solely of numbers. He copied the address into Explorer, hit the return key, and came to a website somewhere on the Internet that contained the sixteen gigabytes of Ekstrom’s hard drive.
Plague had obviously made it simple for himself by copying over Ekstrom’s entire hard drive, and Blomkvist spent more than an hour sorting through its contents. He ignored the system files, software and endless files containing preliminary investigations that seemed to stretch back several years. He downloaded four folders. Three of them were called [PrelimInv/Salander], [Slush/Salander], and [PrelimInv/Niedermann]. The fourth was a copy of Ekstrom’s email folder made at 2.00 p.m. the previous day.
“Thanks, Plague,” Blomkvist said to himself.
He spent three hours reading through Ekstrom’s preliminary investigation and strategy for the trial. Not surprisingly, much of it dealt with Salander’s mental state. Ekstrom wanted an extensive psychiatric examination and had sent a lot of messages with the object of getting her transferred to Kronoberg prison as a matter of urgency.
Blomkvist could tell that Ekstrom’s search for Niedermann was making no headway. Bublanski was the leader of that investigation. He had succeeding in gathering some forensic evidence linking Niedermann to the murders of Svensson and Johansson, as well as to the murder of Bjurman. Blomkvist’s own three long interviews in April had set them on the trail of this evidence. If Niedermann were ever apprehended, Blomkvist would have to be a witness for the prosecution. At long last D.N.A. from sweat droplets and two hairs from Bjurman’s apartment were matched to items from Niedermann’s room in Gosseberga. The same D.N.A. was found in abundant quantities on the remains of Svavelsjo M.C.’s Goransson.
On the other hand, Ekstrom had remarkably little on the record about Zalachenko.
Blomkvist lit a cigarette and stood by the window looking out towards Djurgarden.
Ekstrom was leading two separate preliminary investigations. Criminal Inspector Faste was the investigative leader in all matters dealing with Salander. Bublanski was working only on Niedermann.
When the name Zalachenko turned up in the preliminary investigation, the logical thing for Ekstrom to do would have been to contact the general director of the Security Police to determine who Zalachenko actually was. Blomkvist could find no such enquiry in Ekstrom’s email, journal or notes. But among the notes Blomkvist found several cryptic sentences.
Then a series of notes claiming that Salander was paranoid and a schizophrenic.
He found what linked the investigations in the Salander slush, that is, the supplementary information that the prosecutor considered irrelevant to the preliminary investigation, and which would therefore not be presented at the trial or make up part of the chain of evidence against her. This included almost everything that had to do with Zalachenko’s background.
The investigation was totally inadequate.
Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence and to what extent it was contrived. Where was the boundary? And was Ekstrom aware that there was a boundary?
Could it be that someone was deliberately supplying Ekstrom with believable but misleading information?
Finally Blomkvist logged into hotmail and spent ten minutes checking the half-dozen anonymous email accounts he had created. Each day he had checked the address he had given to Criminal Inspector Modig. He had no great hope that she would contact him, so he was mildly surprised when he opened the inbox and found an email from [email protected]›. The message consisted of a single line:
Cafe Madeleine, upper level, 11.00 a.m. Saturday.
Plague pinged Salander at midnight and interrupted her in the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time with Holger Palmgren as her guardian. She cast an irritated glance at the display.
– What do you want?
– Hello, Wasp, I'm glad to hear from you too.
– Okay, okay. What?
– Teleborian.
She sat up in bed and looked eagerly at the screen of her Palm.
– Tell me.
– Trinity has arranged everything in record time.
– How?
– The shrink's very active. He spends his life traveling between Uppsala and Stockholm and we couldn't make a hostile takeover.
– I know. How?
– Play tennis twice a week. More than two hours. He left the computer in the car in an underground garage.
– Aha.
– Trinity had no problem to deactivate the car alarm and set up the computer. Took only thirty minutes to copy everything to the Firewire and install the Asphyxia.
– Where?
Plague gave her the U.R.L. of the server where he kept Teleborian’s hard drive.
– How Trinity would say, 'this is some nasty shit'.
– …?
