“…and then those idiots pushed the grand piano into the swimming pool.”
Blomkvist was not sure if that had anything to do with the horse. But he was not listening all that carefully. Furthest away from them was a group of colleagues from Dagens Nyheter, among them Mia Cederlund with whom he had had an unhappy affair, and over there was Mårten Nyström, the Royal Dramatic Theatre actor, who had not been shown in a flattering light in Millennium’s investigation into misuse of power in the theatre world. None of them looked all that pleased to see him, and Blomkvist kept his eyes on the table, drank his wine, and thought of Lisbeth Salander.
She was his and Armansky’s only point in common. Armansky was the only employer she had ever had, and he had never really got over her, which was perhaps not so surprising. Long ago Armansky had given her a job as some sort of a social welfare project, and she turned out to be the most brilliant colleague he had ever had. For a while he may even have been in love with her.
“Sounds wild,” Blomkvist said.
“You can say that again, and the piano—”
“So you had no idea either that she was going to move?” he interrupted.
Armansky was reluctant to change the subject, and perhaps it upset him that Blomkvist was not more amused by his story. After all, a grand piano in a swimming pool…But then he quickly became serious.
“I shouldn’t really be telling you this,” he began.
Blomkvist thought that sounded like a good start and he leaned forward.
* * *
—
Lisbeth had had a nap and a shower and was sitting at her computer in her Copenhagen hotel room when Plague—her closest contact in Hacker Republic—sent an encrypted message. It was only a short, routine question, but it still disturbed her.
<What’s up?> he wrote.
It’s all fucked up, she thought. She answered:
<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.”