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

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium #0) Page 42

"Peter, please speak up."

"She sort of halfway believed the first email although she was quite surprised by it. But then she realized that this isn't exactly your style and then..."

"Then?"

"Well, she thinks it's embarrassing and doesn't quite know what to do. Part of it is probably that she's very impressed by you and likes you a lot... as a boss, I mean. So she came to me and asked for my advice."

"And what did you tell her?"

"I said that someone had faked your address and is obviously harassing her. Or possibly both of you. And I said I'd talk to you about it."

"Thank you. Could you please ask her to come to my office in ten minutes?"

In the meantime Berger composed her own email.

It has come to my attention that an employee of S.M.P. has received a number of emails that appear to come from me. The emails contain vulgar sexual innuendos. I have also received similar emails from a sender who purports to be "centraled" at S.M.P. No such address exists.

I have consulted the head of the I.T. department, who informs me that it is very easy to fake a sender's address. I don't understand how it's done, but there are sites on the Internet where such things can be arranged. I have to draw the conclusion that some sick individual is doing this.

I want to know if any other colleagues have received strange emails. If so, I would like them to inform Fredriksson of this immediately. If these very unpleasant pranks continue we will have to consider reporting them to the police.

Erika Berger, Editor-in-Chief

She printed a copy of the email and then pressed send so that the message went out to all employees in the company. At that moment, Eva Carlsson knocked on the door.

"Hello, have a seat," Berger said. "Peter told me that you got an email from me."

"Well, I didn't really think it came from you."

"Thirty seconds ago you did get an email from me. I wrote it all by myself and sent it to everyone in the company."

She handed Carlsson the printout.

"O.K. I get it," the girl said.

"I'm really sorry that somebody decided to target you for this ugly campaign."

"You don't have to apologize for the actions of some idiot."

"I just want to make sure that you don't have one lingering grain of a suspicion that I had anything to do with these emails."

"I never believed you sent them."

"Thanks," Berger said with a smile.

Figuerola spent the afternoon gathering information. She started by ordering passport photographs of Faulsson. Then she ran a check in the criminal records and got a hit at once.

Lars Faulsson, forty-seven years old and known by the nickname Falun, had begun his criminal career stealing cars at seventeen. In the '70s and '80s he was twice arrested and charged with breaking and entering, burglary and receiving stolen goods. The first time he was given a light prison sentence; the second time he got three years. At that time he was regarded as "up and coming" in criminal circles and had been questioned as a suspect in three other burglaries, one of which was a relatively complicated and widely reported safecracking heist at a department store in Vasterås. When he got out of prison in 1984 he kept his nose clean  -  or at least he did not pull any jobs that got him arrested and convicted again. But he had retrained himself to be a locksmith (of all professions), and in 1987 he started his own company, the Lock and Key Service, with an address near Norrtull in Stockholm.

Identifying the woman who had filmed Mårtensson and Faulsson proved to be easier than she had anticipated. She simply called Milton Security and explained that she was looking for a female employee she had met a while ago and whose name she had forgotten. She could give a good description of the woman. The switchboard told her that it sounded like Susanne Linder, and put her through. When Linder answered the telephone, Figuerola apologized and said she must have dialled the wrong number.

The public register listed eighteen Susanne Linders in Stockholm county, three of them around thirty-five years old. One lived in Norrtalje, one in Stockholm, and one in Nacka. She requisitioned their passport photographs and identified at once the woman she had followed from Bellmansgatan as the Susanne Linder who lived in Nacka.

She set out her day's work in a memo and went in to see Edklinth.

Blomkvist closed Cortez's research folder and pushed it away with distaste. Malm put down the printout of his article, which he had read four times. Cortez sat on the sofa in Eriksson's office looking guilty.

"Coffee," Eriksson said, getting up. She came back with four mugs and the coffee pot.

"This is a great sleazy story," Blomkvist said. "First-class research. Documentation to the hilt. Perfect dramaturgy with a bad guy who swindles Swedish tenants through the system  -  which is legal  -  but who is so greedy and so bloody stupid that he outsources to this company in Vietnam."

"Very well written too," Malm said. "The day after we publish this, Borgsjo is going to be persona non grata. T.V. is going to pick this up. He's going to be right up there with the directors of Skandia. A genuine scoop for Millennium. Well done, Henry."

"But this thing with Erika is a real fly in the ointment," Blomkvist said.

"Why should that be a problem?" Eriksson said. "Erika isn't the villain. We have to be free to examine any chairman of the board, even if he happens to be her boss."

"It's a hell of a dilemma," Blomkvist said.

"Erika hasn't altogether left here," Malm said. "She owns 30 per cent of Millennium and sits on our board. In fact, she's chairman of the board until we can elect Harriet Vanger at the next board meeting, and that won't be until August. Plus Erika is working at S.M.P., where she also sits on the board, and you're about to expose her chairman."

Glum silence.

"So what the hell are we going to do?" Cortez said. "Do we kill the article?"

Blomkvist looked Cortez straight in the eye. "No, Henry. We're not going to kill the article. That's not the way we do things at Millennium.

But this is going to take some legwork. We can't just dump it on Erika's desk as a newspaper billboard."

Malm waved a finger in the air. "We're really putting Erika on the spot. She'll have to choose between selling her share of Millennium and leaving our board... or in the worst case, she could get fired by S.M.P. Either way she would have a fearful conflict of interest. Honestly, Henry... I agree with Mikael that we should publish the story, but we may have to postpone it for a month."

"Because we're facing a conflict of loyalties too," Blomkvist said.

"Should I call her?"

"No, Christer," Blomkvist said. "I'll call her and arrange to meet. Say for tonight."

Figuerola gave a summary of the circus that had sprung up around Blomkvist's building on Bellmansgatan. Edklinth felt the floor sway slightly beneath his chair.

"An employee of S.I.S. goes into Blomkvist's building with an ex-safebreaker, now retrained as a locksmith."

"Correct."

"What do you think they did in the stairwell?"

"I don't know. But they were in there for forty-nine minutes. My guess is that Faulsson opened the door and Mårtensson spent the time in Blomkvist's apartment."

"And what did they do there?"

"It couldn't have been to plant bugs, because that takes only a minute or so. Mårtensson must have been looking through Blomkvist's papers or whatever else he keeps at his place."

"But Blomkvist has already been warned... they stole Bjorck's report from there."

"Quite right. He knows he's being watched, and he's watching the ones who are watching him. He's calculating."

"Calculating what?"

"I mean, he has a plan. He's gathering information and is going to expose Mårtensson. That's the only reasonable explanation."

"And then this Linder woman?"

"Susanne Linder, former police officer."

"Police officer?"

"She graduated from the police academy and worked for six years on the Sodermalm crime team. She resigned abruptly. There's nothing in her file that says why. She was out of a job for several months before she was hired by Milton Security."

"Armansky," Edklinth said thoughtfully. "How long was she in the building?"

"Nine minutes."

"Doing what?"

"I'm guessing  -  since she was filming Mårtensson and Faulsson on the street  -  that she's documenting their activities. That means that Milton Security is working with Blomkvist and has placed surveillance cameras in his apartment or in the stairwell. She probably went in to collect the film."

Edklinth sighed. The Zalachenko story was beginning to get tremendously complicated.

"Thank you. You go home. I have to think about this."

Figuerola went to the gym at St Eriksplan.

Blomkvist used his second mobile when he punched in Berger's number at S.M.P. He interrupted a discussion she was having with her editors about what angle to give an article on international terrorism.

"Oh, hello, it's you... wait a second."

Berger put her hand over the mouthpiece.

"I think we're done," she said, and gave them one last instruction. When she was alone she said: "Hello, Mikael. Sorry not to have been in touch. I'm just so swamped here. There are a thousand things I've got to learn. How's the Salander stuff going?"

"Good. But that's not why I called. I have to see you. Tonight."

"I wish I could, but I have to be here until 8.00. And I'm dead tired. I've been at it since dawn. What's it about?"

"I'll tell you when I see you. But it's not good."

"I'll come to your place at 8.30."

"No. Not at mine. It's a long story, but my apartment is unsuitable for the time being. Let's meet at Samir's Cauldron for a beer."

"I'm driving."

"Then we'll have a light beer."

Berger was slightly annoyed when she walked into Samir's Cauldron. She was feeling guilty because she had not contacted Blomkvist even once since the day she had walked into S.M.P.

Blomkvist waved from a corner table. She stopped in the doorway. For a second he seemed a stranger. Who's that over there? God, I'm so tired. Then he stood and kissed her on the cheek, and she realized to her dismay that she had not even thought about him for several weeks and that she missed him terribly. It was as though her time at S.M.P. had been a dream and she might suddenly wake up on the sofa at Millennium. It felt unreal.

"Hello, Mikael."

"Hello, editor-in-chief. Have you eaten?"

"It's 8.30. I don't have your disgusting eating habits."

Samir came over with the menu and, she realised she was hungry. She ordered a beer and a small plate of calamari with Greek potatoes. Blomkvist ordered couscous and a beer.

"How are you?" she said.

"These are interesting times we're living in. I'm swamped too."

"And Salander?"

"She's part of what makes it so interesting."

"Micke, I'm not going to steal your story."

"I'm not trying to evade your question. The truth is that right now everything is a little confused. I'd love to tell you the whole thing, but it would take half the night. How do you like being editor-in-chief?"

"It's not exactly Millennium. I fall asleep like a blown-out candle as soon as I get home, and when I wake up, I see spreadsheets before my eyes. I've missed you. Can't we go back to your place and sleep? I don't have the energy for sex, but I'd love to curl up and sleep next to you."

"I'm sorry, Ricky. The apartment isn't a good place right now."

"Why not? Has something happened?"

"Well, some spooks have bugged the place and they listen, presumably, to every word I say. I've had cameras installed to record what happens when I'm not home. I don't think we should let the state archives have footage of your naked self."

"Are you kidding?"

"No. But that wasn't why I had to see you tonight."

"What is it? Tell me."

"Well, I'll be very direct. We've come across a story that will sink your chairman. It's about using child labour and exploiting political prisoners in Vietnam. We're looking at a conflict of interest."

Berger put down her fork and stared at him. She saw at once that he was not being funny.

"This is how things stand," he said. "Borgsjo is chairman and majority shareholder of a company called Svea Construction, which in turn is sole owner of a subsidiary called Vitavara Inc. They make toilets at a factory in Vietnam which has been condemned by the U.N. for using child labour."

"Run that by me again."

Blomkvist told her the details of the story that Cortez had compiled. He opened his laptop bag and took out a copy of the documentation. Berger read slowly through the article. Finally she looked up and met Blomkvist's eyes. She felt unreasoning panic mixed with disbelief.

"Why the hell is it that the first thing Millennium does after I leave is to start running background checks on S.M.P.'s board members?"

"That's not what happened, Ricky." He explained how the story had developed.

"And how long have you known about this?"

"Since today, since this afternoon. I feel deeply uncomfortable about how this has unfolded."