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

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Millennium #0) Page 52

Blomkvist smiled.

Eriksson worked at her kitchen table at home in Årsta until the small hours. She sat bent over spreadsheets of Millennium's budget and was so engrossed that Anton, her boyfriend, eventually gave up trying to have a conversation with her. He washed the dishes, made a late snack, and put on some coffee. Then he left her in peace and sat down to watch a repeat of C.S.I.

Malin had never before had to cope with anything more complex than a household budget, but she had worked alongside Berger balancing the monthly books, and she understood the principles. Now she was suddenly editor-in-chief, and with that role came responsibility for the budget. Sometime after midnight she decided that, whatever happened, she was going to have to get an accountant to help her. Ingela Oscarsson, who did the bookkeeping one day a week, had no responsibility for the budget and was not at all helpful when it came to making decisions about how much a freelancer should be paid or whether they could afford to buy a new laser printer that was not already included in the sum earmarked for capital investments or I.T. upgrades. In practice it was a ridiculous situation  -  Millennium was making a profit, but that was because Berger had always managed to balance an extremely tight budget. Instead of investing in something as fundamental as a new colour laser printer for 45,000 kronor, they would have to settle for a black-and-white printer for 8,000 instead.

For a moment she envied Berger. At S.M.P. she had a budget in which such a cost would be considered pin money.

Millennium's financial situation had been healthy at the last annual general meeting, but the surplus in the budget was primarily made up of the profits from Blomkvist's book about the Wennerstrom affair. The revenue that had been set aside for investment was shrinking alarmingly fast. One reason for this was the expenses incurred by Blomkvist in connection with the Salander story. Millennium did not have the resources to keep any employee on an open-ended budget with all sorts of expenses in the form of rental cars, hotel rooms, taxis, purchase of research material, new mobile telephones and the like.

Eriksson signed an invoice from Daniel Olsson in Goteborg. She sighed. Blomkvist had approved a sum of 14,000 kronor for a week's research on a story that was not now going to be published. Payment to an Idris Ghidi went into the budget under fees to sources who could not be named, which meant that the accountant would remonstrate about the lack of an invoice or receipt and insist that the matter have the board's approval. Millennium had paid a fee to Advokat Giannini which was supposed to come out of the general fund, but she had also invoiced Millennium for train tickets and other costs.

She put down her pen and looked at the totals. Blomkvist had blown 150,000 kronor on the Salander story, way beyond their budget. Things could not go on this way.

She was going to have to have a talk with him.

Berger spent the evening not on her sofa watching T.V., but in A.&E. at Nacka hospital. The shard of glass had penetrated so deeply that the bleeding would not stop. It turned out that one piece had broken off and was still in her heel, and would have to be removed. She was given a local anaesthetic and afterwards the wound was sewn up with three stitches.

Berger cursed the whole time she was at the hospital, and she kept trying to call her husband or Blomkvist. Neither chose to answer the telephone. By 10.00 she had her foot wrapped in a thick bandage. She was given crutches and took a taxi home.

She spent a while limping around the living room, sweeping up the floor. She called Emergency Glass to order a new window. She was in luck. It had been a quiet evening and they arrived within twenty minutes. But the living-room window was so big that they did not have the glass in stock. The glazier offered to board up the window with plywood for the time being, and she accepted gratefully.

As the plywood was being put up, she called the duty officer at Nacka Integrated Protection, and asked why the hell their expensive burglar alarm had not gone off when someone threw a brick through her biggest window.

Someone from N.I.P. came out to look at the damage. It turned out that whoever had installed the alarm several years before had neglected to connect the leads from the windows in the living room.

Berger was furious.

The man from N.I.P. said they would fix it first thing in the morning. Berger told him not to bother. Instead she called the duty officer at Milton Security and explained her situation. She said that she wanted to have a complete alarm package installed the next morning. I know I have to sign a contract, but tell Armansky that Erika Berger called and make damn sure someone comes round in the morning.

Then, finally, she called the police. She was told that there was no car available to come and take her statement. She was advised to contact her local station in the morning. Thank you. Fuck off.

Then she sat and fumed for a long time until her adrenaline level dropped and it began to sink in that she was going to have to sleep alone in a house without an alarm while somebody was running around the neighbourhood calling her a whore and smashing her windows.

She wondered whether she ought to go into the city to spend the night at a hotel, but Berger was not the kind of person who liked to be threatened. And she liked giving in to threats even less.

But she did take some elementary safety precautions.

Blomkvist had told her once how Salander had put paid to the serial killer Martin Vanger with a golf club. So she went to the garage and spent several minutes looking for her golf bag, which she had hardly even thought about for fifteen years. She chose an iron that she thought had a certain heft to it and laid it within easy reach of her bed. She left a putter in the hall and an 8-iron in the kitchen. She took a hammer from the tool box in the basement and put that in the master bathroom too.

She put the canister of Mace from her shoulder bag on her bedside table. Finally she found a rubber doorstop and wedged it under the bedroom door. And then she almost hoped that the moron who had called her a whore and destroyed her window would be stupid enough to come back that night.

By the time she felt sufficiently entrenched it was 1.00. She had to be at S.M.P. at 8.00. She checked her diary and saw that she had four meetings, the first at 10.00. Her foot was aching badly. She undressed and crept into bed.

Then, inevitably, she lay awake and worried.

Whore.

She had received nine emails, all of which had contained the word "whore," and they all seemed to come from sources in the media. The first had come from her own newsroom, but the source was a fake.

She got out of bed and took out the new Dell laptop that she had been given when she had started at S.M.P.

The first email  -  which was also the most crude and intimidating with its suggestion that she would be fucked with a screwdriver  -  had come on May 16, a couple of weeks ago.

Email number two had arrived two days later, on May 18.

Then a week went by before the emails started coming again, now at intervals of about twenty-four hours. Then the attack on her home. Again, whore.

During that time Carlsson on the culture pages had received an ugly email purportedly sent by Berger. And if Carlsson had received an email like that, it was entirely possible that the emailer had been busy elsewhere too  -  that other people had got mail apparently from her that she did not know about.

It was an unpleasant thought.

The most disturbing was the attack on her house.

Someone had taken the trouble to find out where she lived, drive out here, and throw a brick through the window. It was obviously premeditated  -  the attacker had brought his can of spray paint. The next moment she froze when she realized that she could add another attack to the list. All four of her tyres had been slashed when she spent the night with Blomkvist at the Slussen Hilton.

The conclusion was just as unpleasant as it was obvious. She was being stalked.

Someone, for some unknown reason, had decided to harass her.

The fact that her home had been subject to an attack was understandable  -  it was where it was and impossible to disguise. But if her car had been damaged on some random street in Sodermalm, her stalker must have been somewhere nearby when she parked it. They must have been following her.

CHAPTER 18

THURSDAY, 2. VI

Berger's mobile was ringing. It was 9.05.

"Good morning, Fru Berger. Dragan Armansky. I understand you called last night."

Berger explained what had happened and asked whether Milton Security could take over the contract from Nacka Integrated Protection.

"We can certainly install an alarm that will work," Armansky said. "The problem is that the closest car we have at night is in Nacka centre. Response time would be about thirty minutes. If we took the job I'd have to subcontract out your house. We have an agreement with a local security company, Adam Security in Fisksatra, which has a response time of ten minutes if all goes as it should."

"That would be an improvement on N.I.P., which doesn't bother to turn up at all."

"It's a family-owned business, a father, two sons, and a couple of cousins. Greeks, good people. I've known the father for many years. They handle coverage about 320 days a year. They tell us in advance the days they aren't available because of holidays or something else, and then our car in Nacka takes over."

"That works for me."

"I'll be sending a man out this morning. His name is David Rosin, and in fact he's already on his way. He's going to do a security assessment. He needs your keys if you're not going to be home, and he needs your authorization to do a thorough examination of your house, from top to bottom. He's going to take pictures of the entire property and the immediate surroundings."

"Alright."

"Rosin has a lot of experience, and we'll make you a proposal. We'll have a complete security plan ready in a few days which will include a personal attack alarm, fire security, evacuation and break-in protection."

"O.K."

"If anything should happen, we also want you to know what to do in the ten minutes before the car arrives from Fisksatra."

"Sounds good."

"We'll install the alarm this afternoon. Then we'll have to sign a contract."

Only after she had finished her conversation with Armansky did Berger realize that she had overslept. She picked up her mobile to call Fredriksson and explained that she had hurt herself. He would have to cancel the 10.00.

"What's happened?" he said.

"I cut my foot," Berger said. "I'll hobble in as soon as I've pulled myself together."

She used the toilet in the master bathroom and then pulled on some black trousers and borrowed one of Greger's slippers for her injured foot. She chose a black blouse and put on a jacket. Before she removed the doorstop from the bedroom door, she armed herself with the canister of Mace.

She made her way cautiously through the house and switched on the coffeemaker. She had her breakfast at the kitchen table, listening out for sounds in the vicinity. She had just poured a second cup of coffee when there was a firm knock on the front door. It was David Rosin from Milton Security.

Figuerola walked to Bergsgatan and summoned her four colleagues for an early morning conference.

"We've got a deadline now," she said. "Our work has to be done by July 13, the day the Salander trial begins. We have just under six weeks. Let's agree on what's most important right now. Who wants to go first?"

Berglund cleared his throat. "The blond man with Mårtensson. Who is he?"

"We have photographs, but no idea how to find him. We can't put out an A.P.B."

"What about Gullberg, then? There must be a story to track down there. We have him in the Secret State Police from the early '50s to 1964, when S.I.S. was founded. Then he vanishes."

Figuerola nodded.

"Should we conclude that the Zalachenko club was an association formed in 1964? That would be some time before Zalachenko even came to Sweden."

"There must have been some other purpose... a secret organization within the organization."

"That was after Stig Wennerstrom. Everyone was paranoid."

"A sort of secret spy police?"

"There are in fact parallels overseas. In the States a special group of internal spy chasers was created within the C.I.A. in the '60s. It was led by a James Jesus Angleton, and it very nearly sabotaged the entire C.I.A. Angleton's gang were as fanatical as they were paranoid  -  they suspected everyone in the C.I.A. of being a Russian agent. As a result the agency's effectiveness in large areas was paralysed."

"But that's all speculation..."

"Where are the old personnel files kept?"

"Gullberg isn't in them. I've checked."

"But what about a budget? An operation like this has to be financed."

The discussion went on until lunchtime, when Figuerola excused herself and went to the gym for some peace, to think things over.

Berger did not arrive in the newsroom until lunchtime. Her foot was hurting so badly that she could not put any weight on it. She hobbled over to her glass cage and sank into her chair with relief. Fredriksson looked up from his desk and she waved him in.

"What happened?" he said.

"I trod on a piece of glass and a shard lodged in my heel."

"That... wasn't so good."

"No. It wasn't good. Peter, has anyone received any more weird emails?"

"Not that I've heard."

"O.K. Keep your ears open. I want to know if anything odd happens around S.M.P."

"What sort of odd?"

"I'm afraid some idiot is sending really vile emails and he seems to have targeted me. So I want to know if you hear of anything going on."

"The type of email Eva Carlsson got?"