The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest

She had no idea where he was giving the lectures, or what they were about.

She went upstairs, ran the bath, and undressed. She took Cortez’s folder with her and spent the next half hour reading through the whole story. She could not help but smile. The boy was going to be a formidable reporter. He was twenty-six years old and had been at Millennium for four years, right out of journalism school. She felt a certain pride. The story had Millennium’s stamp on it from beginning to end, every t was crossed, every i dotted.

But she also felt tremendously depressed. Borgsjo was a good man, and she liked him. He was soft-spoken, sharp-witted and charming, and he seemed unconcerned with prestige. Besides, he was her employer. How in God’s name could he have been so bloody stupid?

She wondered whether there might be an alternative explanation or some mitigating circumstances, but she already knew it would be impossible to explain this away.

She put the folder on the windowsill and stretched out in the bath to ponder the situation.

Millennium was going to publish the story, no question. If she had still been there, she would not have hesitated. That Millennium had leaked the story to her in advance was nothing but a courtesy – they wanted to reduce the damage to her personally. If the situation had been reversed – if S.M.P. had made some damaging discovery about Millennium’s chairman of the board (who happened to be herself) – they would not have hesitated either.

Publication would be a serious blow to Borgsjo. The damaging thing was not that his company, Vitavara Inc., had imported goods from a company on the United Nations blacklist of companies using child labour – and in this case slave labour too, in the form of convicts, and undoubtedly some of these convicts were political prisoners. The really damaging thing was that Borgsjo knew about all this and still went on ordering toilets from Fong Soo Industries. It was a mark of the sort of greed that did not go down well with the Swedish people in the wake of the revelations about other criminal capitalists such as Skandia’s former president.

Borgsjo would naturally claim that he did not know about the conditions at Fong Soo, but Cortez had solid evidence. If Borgsjo took that tack he would be exposed as a liar. In June 1997 Borgsjo had gone to Vietnam to sign the first contracts. He had spent ten days there on that occasion and been round the company’s factories. If he claimed not to have known that many of the workers there were only twelve or thirteen years old, he would look like an idiot.

Cortez had demonstrated that in 1999, the U.N. commission on child labour had added Fong Soo Industries to its list of companies that exploit child labour, and that this had then been the subject of magazine articles. Two organizations against child labour, one of them the globally recognized International Joint Effort Against Child Labour in London, had written letters to companies that had placed orders with Fong Soo. Seven letters had been sent to Vitavara Inc., and two of those were addressed to Borgsjo personally. The organization in London had been very willing to supply the evidence. And Vitavara Inc. had not replied to any of the letters.

Worse still, Borgsjo went to Vietnam twice more, in 2001 and 2004, to renew the contracts. This was the coup de grace. It would be impossible for Borgsjo to claim ignorance.

The inevitable media storm could lead only to one thing. If Borgsjo was smart, he would apologize and resign from his positions on various boards. If he decided to fight, he would be steadily annihilated.

Berger did not care if Borgsjo was or was not chairman of the board of Vitavara Inc. What mattered to her was that he was the board chairman of S.M.P. At a time when the newspaper was on the edge and a campaign of rejuvenation was under way, S.M.P. could not afford to keep him as chairman.

Berger’s decision was made.

She would go to Borgsjo, show him the document, and thereby hope to persuade him to resign before the story was published.

If he dug in his heels, she would call an emergency board meeting, explain the situation, and force the board to dismiss Borgsjo. And if they did not, she would have to resign, effective immediately.

She had been thinking for so long that the bathwater was now cold. She showered and towelled herself and went to the bedroom to put on a dressing gown. Then she picked up her mobile and called Blomkvist. No answer. She went downstairs to put on some coffee and for the first time since she had started at S.M.P., she looked to see whether there was a film on T.V. that she could watch to relax.

As she walked into the living room, she felt a sharp pain in her foot. She looked down and saw blood. She took another step and pain shot through her entire foot, and she had to hop over to an antique chair to sit down. She lifted her foot and saw to her dismay that a shard of glass had pierced her heel. At first she felt faint. Then she steeled herself and took hold of the shard and pulled it out. The pain was appalling, and blood gushed from the wound.

She pulled open a drawer in the hall where she kept scarves, gloves and hats. She found a scarf and wrapped it around her foot and tied it tight. That was not going to be enough, so she reinforced it with another improvised bandage. The bleeding had apparently subsided.

She looked at the bloodied piece of glass in amazement. How did this get here? Then she discovered more glass on the hall floor. Jesus Christ… She looked into the living room and saw that the picture window was shattered and the floor was covered in shattered glass.

She went back to the front door and put on the outdoor shoes she had kicked off as she came home. That is, she put on one shoe and stuck the toes of her injured foot into the other, and hopped into the living room to take stock of the damage.

Then she found the brick in the middle of the living-room floor.

She limped over to the balcony door and went out to the garden. Someone had sprayed in metre-high letters on the back wall:

WHORE

It was just after 9.00 in the evening when Figuerola held the car door open for Blomkvist. She went around the car and got into the driver’s seat.

“Should I drive you home or do you want to be dropped off somewhere?”

Blomkvist stared straight ahead. “I haven’t got my bearings yet, to be honest. I’ve never had a confrontation with a prime minister before.”

Figuerola laughed. “You played your cards very well,” she said. “I would never have guessed you were such a good poker player.”

“I meant every word.”

“Of course, but what I meant was that you pretended to know a lot more than you actually do. I realized that when I worked out how you identified me.”

Blomkvist turned and looked at her profile.

“You wrote down my car registration when I was parked on the hill outside your building. You made it sound as if you knew what was being discussed at the Prime Minister’s secretariat.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” Blomkvist said.

She gave him a quick look and turned on to Grev Turegatan. “The rules of the game. I shouldn’t have picked that spot, but there wasn’t anywhere else to park. You keep a sharp eye on your surroundings, don’t you?”

“You were sitting with a map spread out on the front seat, talking on the telephone. I took down your registration and ran a routine check. I check out every car that catches my attention. I usually draw a blank. In your case I discovered that you worked for Sapo.”

“I was following Martensson.”

“Aha. So simple.”

“Then I discovered that you were tailing him using Susanne Linder at Milton Security.”

“Armansky’s detailed her to keep an eye on what goes on around my apartment.”