He was having trouble breathing, not only because of Camilla’s hand. It felt as if the fire was creeping closer and he was sure that he had made a mistake. He had wanted to awaken something inside her. But he had only managed to provoke her fury.
“Answer me!” she yelled.
“Lisbeth has said that…” He gasped for breath.
“What?”
“That she should have understood why Zala came to you at night, but she was so focused on protecting her mother that it didn’t register.”
Camilla took her hands from his throat and kicked the stretcher so that his feet hit the side of the furnace.
“Is that what she told you?”
His pulse was racing. “She didn’t understand.”
“Bullshit! She knew all along, of course she did,” Camilla shouted.
“Calm down, Kira,” Galinov said.
“Never,” she hissed. “Lisbeth’s been telling him barefaced lies.”
“She didn’t know,” Mikael stuttered.
“So that’s what she’s saying? Do you want to know what really happened with Zala? Do you? Zala made me a woman. That’s what he always said.” Camilla hesitated and seemed to be searching for words. “He made me a woman, just as I’m making a man of you now, Mikael,” she said, leaning forward and looking straight at him, and if at first there had been only rage and revenge in her eyes, now they changed.
There was a glimpse of something vulnerable there, and he imagined that a connection had formed between them, perhaps she recognized something of herself in his defencelessness. But he could have been mistaken. The very next second she turned and walked out, shouting something in Russian that sounded like an order.
Now Blomkvist was alone with the man whom he knew only as Ivan, and all he could do was try to endure, and not look into the flames.
|||||
MAY 13, 2008
When Klara saw the climbers in the snowy fog, she collapsed and rolled down the slope, away from Nima Rita, and fell against a body lying there, a man. Was he dead? No, no, he was alive, he moved. He looked at her, and shook his head. He was wearing an oxygen mask. She could not see who it was. But he patted her shoulder.
Then he took off his mask and sunglasses and when his eyes smiled at her, she smiled back, or at least she tried to. But not for long—soon she heard an argument going on over their heads. She caught only fragments. It was to do with everything Johannes—did they really say Johannes?—had done for Nima, and still would do. Build a house. Take care of Luna. But she could make no sense of this.
She was in so much pain. She just lay there in the snow, helpless, she could not get up and she prayed to God that Nima would help her again and yes, there he now was, bending over her, and it felt as if the whole world were reaching down. She was going to be safe. She would go home, see her daughter again. But Nima did not pull her to her feet.
It was the other man, and at first she was not unduly worried. They were just picking him up first. She looked up to see the man draped over Nima, just as she had been hanging over his back before, and she thought that the other person there would help her, the one who had been shouting at Nima. But the minutes went by and then something deeply worrying happened. They staggered away from her. They couldn’t be leaving her behind, could they?
“No,” she screamed. “Don’t leave me, please!”
But they did leave, without looking back, and she stared at their backs disappearing into the storm, and only once she was left with nothing but the sound of their creaking footsteps did the sheer terror of it strike her, and she shrieked until she had no more strength and all she could do was sob quietly, in a despair that she had never imagined possible.
* * *
|||||
Jurij Bogdanov was sitting in a newly built annexe opposite Kira, who had settled into a leather armchair and was nervously sipping an exquisite white Burgundy which had been sent for her benefit.
Bogdanov’s eyes were fixed on his computer. He had to keep track of a whole series of video sequences, not only the one showing Blomkvist writhing in pain, but also coverage of the surrounding countryside.
The building was a glassworks, now disused, which had produced high-quality vases and bowls until it went bust a few years ago, when Kira bought it. It was in an isolated spot far from any built-up area, close to the edge of the forest, and even though the windows were large and tall, it was impossible to see through them; Bogdanov had been obsessive in ensuring they took every precaution. They ought to be safe here. But he was nevertheless not entirely confident, and his thoughts went to Wasp and what he had heard about her. She was said to have got into the NSA’s intranet and read things that not even the President had been allowed to see. She had succeeded in doing what was considered impossible, and in his world she was a legend, whereas Kira…well, what about Kira?
Bogdanov looked over to where she was sitting, beautiful Kira who had picked him out of the gutter and made him rich. He should be feeling nothing but gratitude towards her, and yet—and he felt it like a sudden weight in his body—he was tired of her. He was fed up with her threats and blows, her thirst for revenge, and so, without quite knowing why, he went to the e-mail address he had created and paused for a few seconds, feeling a strange sense of excitement in his body.
Then he typed in the GPS coordinates.
If they couldn’t track down Wasp, she would have to come to them.
* * *
—
Salander had pulled into another rest area, not far from Eskesta on the E4, and was sitting there with her laptop when a car stopped by the side of the road. It was a black Volvo V90 and that made her start and reach for the weapon under her jacket. But it was only a middle-aged couple with a small boy who needed to get out to pee.
Salander went back to her screen. Plague had just sent her a message containing…well, it was nothing like a breakthrough, not remotely, but still, a new direction, to the east.
Just as she had been hoping, that idiot from Svavelsjö, Peter Kovic, had screwed up and got caught on a surveillance camera at a service station on Industrigatan in Rocknö, north of Tierp, at 3:37 that morning. He looked like shit. Big and wet and bloated. In the video footage he could be seen removing his helmet and drinking from a silver-coloured water bottle, before he poured the rest over his hair and face. Probably trying to recover from the mother of all hangovers.
She wrote back:
<Have you been able to follow him further?>
Plague answered:
<After that, nada>