<I’m not in Moscow any longer>
<Why not?>
<I couldn’t pull off what I’d planned>
<What couldn’t you pull off?>
She felt like going out on the town, to forget everything. She wrote:
<Finishing it all off>
<What?>
Bye bye, Plague, she thought. She wrote:
<Nothing>
<Why couldn’t you finish off nothing?>
“Never you mind,” she muttered.
<Because I remembered something>
<What?>
Footsteps, she thought, her father’s whispered voice and her own hesitation, her inability to fully understand, and then the silhouette of her sister getting up from the bed and slipping out of the room with Zala, that pig. She answered:
<Shit>
<What sort of shit?>
She felt like throwing the computer at the wall. She wrote:
<What contacts do we have in Moscow?>
<I’m worried about you, Wasp. Just drop Russia. Get the hell out>
Give me a break, she thought.
<What contacts do we have in Moscow?>
<Good ones>
<Who can set up an IMSI-catcher in a tricky place?>
Mobile interception is child’s play, but who does he know in situ?
<Katya Flip, for example> he wrote.
<Who she?>
<More or less crazy. She used to be in Shaltay Boltay>
Which means she won’t come cheap.
<Can we trust her?>
<Depends how much you’re willing to pay>
<Send me her details>
Then she closed her computer and got up to dress. She decided that the black suit would have to do for today too, even though the rain yesterday had crumpled it and there was a grey stain on the right sleeve. And it didn’t look any better for having been slept in. But what the hell, and she had no intention of putting on make-up either. She ran her fingers through her hair, left the room and took the lift down to the ground floor, where she ordered a beer in the bar.
The open spaces of Kongens Nytorv lay outside, and there were a few dark clouds in the sky. But Salander noticed none of this. She was stuck in the memory of the hand that had hesitated on Tverskoy Boulevard, and in the film from the past that kept replaying in her head. She was oblivious to everything else, until a voice close to her ear suddenly asked:
“Are you OK?”
This annoyed her. Why was it anyone’s business? She did not even look up, and then she saw she had a text from Blomkvist.
* * *
—
Armansky leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially:
“In the spring Lisbeth called to ask me to speak to the apartment owners’ association, and see to it that surveillance cameras were installed outside the entrance to her building on Fiskargatan. I thought that sounded like a good idea.”
“So you arranged for it to be done.”
“Well, it’s not something you can fix just like that, Mikael. You need permission from the county council and one thing and another. But it all worked out this time. I had to point out that the level of threat was considerable and Chief Inspector Bublanski produced a report.”
“Hats off to him.”
“We pulled out all the stops and at the beginning of July I sent two guys over to install a couple of remote-controlled Netgears. We took the greatest care over the encryption, believe you me. Nobody else was to be able to view the film sequences, and I told my team at the surveillance centre to keep an eye on the monitors. I was worried about Lisbeth. I was afraid they were going to come for her.”
“We all were.”
“But I wasn’t expecting to be proved right so soon. Six days later, at half past one in the morning, the microphones we had mounted there picked up the sound of motorcycles, and our night-shift operator Stene Granlund was on the point of repositioning the cameras when someone got there before him.”
“Oops.”
“Exactly. Stene didn’t even have time to think about it. The bikers were two men in leathers from Svavelsjö Motorcycle Club.”
“Bugger.”
“Precisely. Lisbeth’s address was no longer quite so secret, and Svavelsjö don’t usually show up with coffee and buns.”
“Not their style.”
“Fortunately the guys turned around and left when they saw the cameras, and of course we immediately contacted the police, who were able to identify the men—one of them was called Kovic, I remember. Peter Kovic. But that didn’t get rid of the problem, of course, so I rang Lisbeth and asked to meet her right away. She agreed, though rather reluctantly. She came to my office, looking the very image of a perfect daughter-in-law.”
“Sounds like a bit of an exaggeration.”
“I mean, by her standards. The studs had gone, her hair was cut short, and she looked respectable, and I thought, my God, I’ve missed this funny person. I couldn’t bring myself to tear into her—obviously I realized that she’d hacked our cameras—so I just warned her to be careful. They’re out to get you, I told her. ‘People have always been out to get me,’ was all she said, and that really made me mad. I told her that she needed to look for help, for protection: ‘Or they’re going to kill you.’ But then something happened that scared me.”
“What?”
“She looked at the floor and said: ‘Not if I keep one step ahead.’ ”
“What did she mean by that?”
“That’s what I asked myself, and then the story of her father came back to me.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning that she defended herself that time by going on the attack, and I had a feeling that she was planning something similar now: by getting her retaliation in first, and that made me very frightened, Mikael. I saw her eyes and then it no longer mattered how neat and tidy she looked. What I saw was lethal. Her eyes were jet black.”