<Hi, I’m not an idiot. Obviously I’d already requested full sequencing. I got it this morning. Don’t know how thorough the guys have been, but they’ve highlighted some anomalies. I’ve got my own specialists of course, but it won’t do any harm if you have a look too. I’m sending both a worked file with annotations and a FastQ with raw data, in case you prefer to work directly with that. I’d appreciate prompt feedback.
F.N.>
The anger between the lines passed Salander by, and in any case she was swiftly distracted. She could see that Camilla was now in Sweden, on the E4 from Arlanda heading for Stockholm. She clenched her fists and briefly wondered whether she should go there now too. But she stayed at the desk and pulled up the files the Nyman woman had sent, letting the pages scroll past her eyes like a flickering microfilm. Why was she even doing this, could she really be bothered?
For now she resolved to concentrate and take a look, at least while she decided what to do next. She knew that this was where she always excelled.
Salander was capable of grasping within a very short time the content of even the most voluminous documents, and that is why she preferred, as Nyman had suspected, to work directly with raw data. This way she could avoid being influenced by the opinions and annotations of other people. She used the SAMtools programme to convert the information into a so-called BAM file, a document containing the entire genome, and that in itself was no small feat.
In a way it was like a gigantic cryptogram, with four letters: A, C, G and T, the nitrogenous bases adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. At first glance it looked like one big incomprehensible mass. But in fact it was code for an entire life.
To begin with Lisbeth looked for deviations, any deviations, by trawling indices and studying graphs. Then she turned to her BAM Viewer, her IGV, and compared specific and random segments with the DNA sequences of other people she had found in the 1,000 Genomes Project—genetic information collected from all over the world—and it was then that she discovered an anomaly in the rs4954 frequency in what is known as the EPAS1 gene, which regulates the body’s haemoglobin production.
There was something so sensationally different there that she immediately ran a search in the PubMed database, and not long after she suddenly exclaimed aloud and shook her head. Was it really possible? She had had an inkling it might be something like that, but she had not expected to see it in black and white quite so soon. Now utterly focused, she forgot all about her sister in Stockholm and even failed to notice that Paulina had come in and greeted her before going into the bathroom.
Now Salander was entirely concentrated on learning more about this variant of the EPAS1 gene. Not only was it extremely unusual, it also had a spectacular background, traceable all the way back to the Denisova hominins, a subspecies of Homo sapiens which had died out forty thousand years ago.
For a long time the Denisovans were unknown to scientists, but their existence had been recognized ever since Russian archaeologists discovered a bone fragment and the tooth of a woman in the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia in 2008. It seemed that in the course of history the Denisovans interbred with Homo sapiens in South Asia and passed on some of their genes to contemporary humans, among others this variant of EPAS1.
Thanks to the variant, the body can assimilate even small volumes of oxygen. It makes the blood thinner and helps it to circulate faster, and this lowers the risk of blood clotting and edema. It is especially advantageous for people living and working at high altitudes, where oxygen levels are lower, and that matched Salander’s initial assumptions, based on the beggar’s injuries and amputations and his carbon-13 analysis.
But even though she now had such an obvious indication, she could not be certain. The variant was unusual but still found in various parts of the world, so she investigated the man’s Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA and saw that he belonged to haplogroup C4a3b1, and once she had checked that her remaining doubts disappeared.
That group was found only among people who live high up on the slopes of the Himalayas in Nepal and Tibet, who often work as porters or guides on high-altitude expeditions.
The man was a Sherpa.
PART II
THE MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
AUGUST 25–27
The Sherpas are an ethnic group in the Himalayan region of Nepal. Many of them work as guides or porters on high-altitude expeditions.
The majority are adherents of Nyingma, an ancient school of Buddhism, and believe that gods and spirits inhabit the mountains. The deities must be respected and revered in accordance with religious rituals.
A Lhawa, a shaman, is thought to be able to help a Sherpa who is ill or suffers an accident.
CHAPTER 12
August 25
There were dark clouds out at sea and Blomkvist, in his cabin in Sandhamn, was searching aimlessly online. He kept being drawn to information about Johannes Forsell. Occasionally he bumped into him at the grocer’s or down at the harbour, but he had also interviewed him when he became Minister of Defence three years ago, in October 2017. He remembered waiting in a big room with maps on the walls and Forsell putting his head round the door like a cheerful little boy arriving at a party.
“Mikael Blomkvist,” he said. “My God, how wonderful.”
Blomkvist was not used to being greeted in that way by politicians, and perhaps he should have dismissed it as an attempt to butter him up. But there was something genuinely enthusiastic about Forsell, and he recalled how stimulating their conversation had been. Forsell was quick-witted and on top of his subjects, and he gave real answers, as if he were truly interested in the questions and not engaging in party politics. Even so, Blomkvist’s clearest memory was of the Danish pastries. On the table there was a plate laden with them, and Forsell most definitely did not look like a man who ate Danish pastries.
He was tall and fit, a fine figure of a man. He ran three miles and did two hundred push-ups every morning, he said, and displayed no signs of lightheartedness whatsoever. Maybe the pastries were an effort to show a common touch, an elitist trying to appear normal, just like the time he told Aftonbladet that he had always loved the annual Melodifestivalen song competition, without then being able to answer a single question about it.
Blomkvist and he were the same age, they realized, even though Forsell surely looked younger, and would score better in any health check. He was bursting with energy and optimism. “The world looks a dark place, but we’re making progress. There are fewer and fewer wars, let’s not forget that,” he said, giving Blomkvist a book by Steven Pinker which was lying around somewhere, still unread.
Forsell had been born in Östersund to a family with a small business consisting of a guest house and a holiday village in Åre. He stood out at school from an early age, was a promising cross-country skier and went to a special high school in Sollefteå for talented young winter sportsmen. After an assessment when he was called up for his military service, he was admitted to the Swedish Armed Forces Interpreters’ School, where he learned Russian and became an officer at the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service. For obvious reasons, his years in Must were the least known part of his life. He may, however, have been keeping the GRU’s activities in Sweden under observation; that much transpired from information leaked to the Guardian when Forsell was deported from Russia, where he had been attached to the Swedish Embassy, in late autumn 2008.