The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium #0)

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium #0) Page 29

After the introductory drama, he had gone back in time and described Zalachenko's arrival in Sweden, Salander's childhood, and the events that led to her being locked away in St Stefan's in Uppsala. He was careful to annihilate both Teleborian and the now dead Bjorck. He rehearsed the psychiatric report of 1991 and explained why Salander had become a threat to certain unknown civil servants who had taken it upon themselves to protect the Russian defector. He quoted from the correspondence between Teleborian and Bjorck.

He then described Zalachenko's new identity and his criminal operations. He described his assistant Niedermann, the kidnapping of Miriam Wu, and Paolo Roberto's intervention. Finally, he summed up the denouement in Gosseberga which led to Salander being shot and buried alive, and explained how a policeman's death was a needless catastrophe because Niedermann had already been shackled.

Thereafter the story became more sluggish. Blomkvist's problem was that the account still had gaping holes in it. Bjorck had not acted alone. Behind this chain of events there had to be a larger group with resources and political influence. Anything else did not make sense. But he had eventually come to the conclusion that the unlawful treatment of Salander would not have been sanctioned by the government or the bosses of the Security Police. Behind this conclusion lay no exaggerated trust in government, but rather his faith in human nature. An operation of that type could never have been kept secret if it were politically motivated. Someone would have called in a favour and got someone to talk, and the press would have uncovered the Salander affair several years earlier.

He thought of the Zalachenko club as small and anonymous. He could not identify any one of them, except possibly Mårtensson, a policeman with a secret appointment who devoted himself to shadowing the publisher of Millennium.

It was now clear that Salander would definitely go to trial.

Ekstrom had brought a charge for grievous bodily harm in the case of Magge Lundin, and grievous bodily harm or attempted murder in the case of Karl Axel Bodin.

No date had yet been set, but his colleagues had learned that Ekstrom was planning for a trial in July, depending on the state of Salander's health. Blomkvist understood the reasoning. A trial during the peak holiday season would attract less attention than one at any other time of the year.

Blomkvist's plan was to have the book printed and ready to distribute on the first day of the trial. He and Malm had thought of a paperback edition, shrink-wrapped and sent out with the special summer issue. Various assignments had been given to Cortez and Eriksson, who were to produce articles on the history of the Security Police, the IB affair,[4] and the like.

He frowned as he stared out of the window.

It's not over. The conspiracy is continuing. It's the only way to explain the tapped telephones, the attack on Annika, and the doubletheft of the Salander report. Perhaps the murder of Zalachenko is a part of it too.

But he had no evidence.

Together with Eriksson and Malm, he had decided that Millennium Publishing would publish Svensson's text about sex trafficking, also to coincide with the trial. It was better to present the package all at once, and besides, there was no reason to delay publication. On the contrary  -  the book would never be able to attract the same attention at any other time. Eriksson was Blomkvist's principal assistant for the Salander book. Karim and Malm (against his will) had thus become temporary assistant editors at Millennium, with Nilsson as the only available reporter. One result of this increased workload was that Eriksson had had to contract several freelancers to produce articles for future issues. It was expensive, but they had no choice.

Blomkvist wrote a note on a yellow Post-it, reminding himself to discuss the rights to the book with Svensson's family. His parents lived in orebro and they were his sole heirs. He did not really need permission to publish the book in Svensson's name, but he wanted to go and see them to get their approval. He had postponed the visit because he had had too much to do, but now it was time to take care of the matter.

Then there were a hundred other details. Some of them concerned how he should present Salander in the articles. To make the ultimate decision he needed to have a personal conversation with her to get her approval to tell the truth, or at least parts of it. And he could not have that conversation because she was under arrest and no visitors were allowed.

In that respect, his sister was no help either. Slavishly she followed the regulations and had no intention of acting as Blomkvist's go-between. Nor did Giannini tell him anything of what she and her client discussed, other than the parts that concerned the conspiracy against her  -  Giannini needed help with those. It was frustrating, but all very correct. Consequently Blomkvist had no clue whether Salander had revealed that her previous guardian had raped her, or that she had taken revenge by tattooing a shocking message on his stomach. As long as Giannini did not mention the matter, neither could he.

But Salander's being isolated presented one other acute problem. She was a computer expert, also a hacker, which Blomkvist knew but Giannini did not. Blomkvist had promised Salander that he would never reveal her secret, and he had kept his promise. But now he had a great need for her skills in that field.

Somehow he had to establish contact with her.

He sighed as he opened Olsson's folder again. There was a photocopy of a passport application form for one Idris Ghidi, born 1950. A man with a moustache, olive skin and black hair going grey at the temples.

He was Kurdish, a refugee from Iraq. Olsson had dug up much more on Ghidi than on any other hospital worker. Ghidi had apparently aroused media attention for a time, and appeared in several articles.

Born in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq, he graduated as an engineer and had been part of the "great economic leap forward" in the '70s. In 1984 he was a teacher at the College of Construction Technology in Mosul. He had not been known as a political activist, but he was a Kurd, and so a potential criminal in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. In 1987 Ghidi's father was arrested on suspicion of being a Kurdish militant. No elaboration was forthcoming. He was executed in January 1988. Two months later Idris Ghidi was seized by the Iraqi secret police, taken to a prison outside Mosul, and tortured there for eleven months to make him confess. What he was expected to confess, Ghidi never discovered, so the torture continued.

In March 1989, one of Ghidi's uncles paid the equivalent of 50,000 Swedish kronor, to the local leader of the Ba'ath Party, as compensation for the injury Ghidi had caused the Iraqi state. Two days later he was released into his uncle's custody. He weighed thirty-nine kilos and was unable to walk. Before his release, his left hip was smashed with a sledgehammer to discourage any mischief in the future.

He hovered between life and death for several weeks. When, slowly, he began to recover, his uncle took him to a farm well away from Mosul and there, over the summer, he regained his strength and was eventually able to walk again with crutches. He would never regain full health. The question was: what was he going to do in the future? In August he learned that his two brothers had been arrested. He would never see them again. When his uncle heard that Saddam Hussein's police were looking once more for Ghidi, he arranged, for a fee of 30,000 kronor, to get him across the border into Turkey and thence with a false passport to Europe.

Idris Ghidi landed at Arlanda airport in Sweden on 19 October, 1989. He did not know a word of Swedish, but he had been told to go to the passport police and immediately to ask for political asylum, which he did in broken English. He was sent to a refugee camp in Upplands Vasby. There he would spend almost two years, until the immigration authorities decided that Ghidi did not have sufficient grounds for a residency permit.

By this time Ghidi had learned Swedish and obtained treatment for his shattered hip. He had two operations and could now walk without crutches. During that period the Sjobo debate[5] had been conducted in Sweden, refugee camps had been attacked, and Bert Karlsson had formed the New Democracy Party.

The reason why Ghidi had appeared so frequently in the press archives was that at the eleventh hour he came by a new lawyer who went directly to the press, and they published reports on his case. Other Kurds in Sweden got involved, including members of the prominent Baksi family. Protest meetings were held and petitions were sent to Minister of Immigration Birgit Friggebo, with the result that Ghidi was granted both a residency permit and a work visa in the kingdom of Sweden. In January 1992 he left Upplands Vasby a free man.

Ghidi soon discovered that being a well-educated and experienced construction engineer counted for nothing. He worked as a newspaper boy, a dish-washer, a doorman, and a taxi driver. He liked being a taxi driver except for two things. He had no local knowledge of the streets in Stockholm county, and he could not sit still for more than an hour before the pain in his hip became unbearable.

In May 1998 he moved to Goteborg after a distant relative took pity on him and offered him a steady job at an office-cleaning firm. He was given a part-time job managing a cleaning crew at Sahlgrenska hospital, with which the company had a contract. The work was routine. He swabbed floors six days a week including, as Olsson's ferreting had revealed, in corridor 11C.

Blomkvist studied the photograph of Idris Ghidi from the passport application. Then he logged on to the media archive and picked out several of the articles on which Olsson's report was based. He read attentively. He lit a cigarette. The smoking ban at Millennium had soon been relaxed after Berger left. Cortez now kept an ashtray on his desk.

Finally Blomkvist read what Olsson had produced about Dr Anders Jonasson.

Blomkvist did not see the grey Volvo on Monday, nor did he have the feeling that he was being watched or followed, but he walked briskly from the Academic bookshop to the side entrance of N.K. department store, and then straight through and out of the main entrance. Anybody who could keep up surveillance inside the bustling N.K. would have to be superhuman. He turned off both his mobiles and walked through the Galleria to Gustav Adolfs Torg, past the parliament building, and into Gamla Stan. Just in case anyone was still following him, he took a zigzag route through the narrow streets of the old city until he reached the right address and knocked at the door of Black/White Publishing.

It was 2.30 in the afternoon. He was there without warning, but the editor, Kurdo Baksi, was in and delighted to see him.

"Hello there," he said heartily. "Why don't you ever come and visit me any more?"

"I'm here to see you right now," Blomkvist said.

"Sure, but it's been three years since the last time."

They shook hands.

Blomkvist had known Baksi since the '80s. Actually, Blomkvist had been one of the people who gave Baksi practical help when he started the magazine Black/White with an issue that he produced secretly at night at the Trades Union Federation offices. Baksi had been caught in the act by Per-Erik Åstrom  -  the same man who went on to be the paedophile hunter at Save the Children  -  who in the '80s was the research secretary at the Trades Union Federation. He had discovered stacks of pages from Black/White's first issue along with an oddly subdued Baksi in one of the copy rooms. Åstrom had looked at the front page and said: "God Almighty, that's not how a magazine is supposed to look." After that Åstrom had designed the logo that was on Black/White's masthead for fifteen years before Black/White magazine went to its grave and became the book publishing house Black/White. At the same time Blomkvist had been suffering through an appalling period as I.T. consultant at the Trades Union Federation  -  his only venture into the I.T. field. Åstrom had enlisted him to proofread and give Black/White some editorial support. Baksi and Blomkvist had been friends ever since.

Blomkvist sat on a sofa while Baksi got coffee from a machine in the hallway. They chatted for a while, the way you do when you haven't seen someone for some time, but they were constantly being interrupted by Baksi's mobile. He would have urgent-sounding conversations in Kurdish or possibly Turkish or Arabic or some other language that Blomkvist did not understand. It had always been this way on his other visits to Black/White Publishing. People called from all over the world to talk to Baksi.

"My dear Mikael, you look worried. What's on your mind?" he said at last.

"Could you turn off your telephone for a few minutes?"

Baksi turned off his telephone.

"I need a favour. A really important favour, and it has to be done immediately and cannot be mentioned outside this room."

"Tell me."

"In 1989 a refugee by the name of Idris Ghidi came to Sweden from Iraq. When he was faced with the prospect of deportation, he received help from your family until he was granted a residency permit. I don't know if it was your father or somebody else in the family who helped him."

"It was my uncle Mahmut. I know Ghidi. What's going on?"

"He's working in Goteborg. I need his help to do a simple job. I'm willing to pay him."

"What kind of job?"

"Do you trust me, Kurdo?"

"Of course. We've always been friends."

"The job I need done is very odd. I don't want to say what it entails right now, but I assure you it's in no way illegal, nor will it cause any problems for you or for Ghidi."

Baksi gave Blomkvist a searching look. "You don't want to tell me what it's about?"

"The fewer people who know, the better. But I need your help for an introduction  -  so that Idris will listen to me."

Baksi went to his desk and opened an address book. He looked through it for a minute before he found the number. Then he picked up the telephone. The conversation was in Kurdish. Blomkvist could see from Baksi's expression that he started out with words of greeting and small talk before he got serious and explained why he was calling. After a while he said to Blomkvist: