“Why’s that, do you think?”
“I really don’t know. But I got the feeling that there was something weighing on him, and he didn’t protest too much when I arranged for a sophisticated alarm system in his house. It’s just been installed.”
“By whom?”
“A company we often use, Milton Security.”
“Good. But my recommendation is to move him to a safe house.”
“Is it that bad?”
“We think the risk is real.”
“O.K.,” Grane said. “If you send over some documentation I’ll have a word with my superior right away.”
“I’ll see what I can do, but I’m not sure what I can get my hands on. We’ve been having... some computer issues.”
“Can an agency like yours really afford to have that sort of thing?”
“No, you’re right. Let me get back to you, sweetheart,” she said, and hung up. Grane remained quite still and looked out at the storm lashing against the window with increasing fury.
Then she picked up her Blackphone and rang Balder. She let it ring and ring. Not just to warn him and see to it that he move to a safe place at once, but also because she suddenly wanted to know what he had meant when he said: “These past few days I’ve been dreaming about a new kind of life.”
No-one would have believed that at that moment Balder was fully occupied with his son.
Blomkvist remained sitting for a while after Brandell had left, drinking his Guinness and staring out at the storm. Behind him, Arne and his gang were laughing at something. But Blomkvist was so engrossed in his thoughts that he heard nothing, and hardly even noticed that Amir had sat down next to him and was giving him the latest weather forecast.
The temperature was already down to -10 °C. The first snow of the year was expected to fall, and not in any pleasant or picturesque way. The misery was going to come blasting in sideways in the worst storm the country had seen for a long time.
“Could get hurricane-force winds,” Amir said, and Blomkvist, who still was not listening, just said, “That’s good.”
“Good?”
“Yes... well... better than no weather at all.”
“I suppose. But are you alright? You look shaken up. Wasn’t it a useful meeting?”
“Sure, it was fine.”
“But what you got to hear rattled you, didn’t it?”
“I’m not certain. Things are just a mess right now. I’m thinking of quitting Millennium.”
“I thought you basically were that magazine.”
“I thought so too. But I guess there’s an end to everything.”
“That’s probably true,” Amir said. “My old man used to say that there’s even an end to eternity.”
“What did he mean by that?”
“I think he was talking about love everlasting. It was shortly before he left my mother.”
Blomkvist chuckled. “I haven’t been so good at everlasting love myself. On the other hand...”
“Yes, Mikael?”
“There’s a woman I used to know — she’s been out of my life for some time now.”
“Tricky.”
“Well, yes, it is. But now I’ve had a sign of life from her, or at least I think I did, and perhaps that’s what’s got me looking a bit funny.”
“Right.”
“I’d better get myself home. What do I owe you?”
“We can settle up another time.”
“Great, take care, Amir,” he said. He walked past the regulars, who threw a few random comments at him, and stepped into the storm.
It was a near-death experience. Gusts of wind blew straight through his body, but in spite of them he stood still for a while, lost in old memories. He thought about a dragon tattoo on a skinny pale back, a cold snap on Hedeby Island in the midst of a decades-old missing-person case and a dug-up grave in Gosseberga that was nearly the resting place of a woman who refused to give up. Then he walked home slowly. For some reason he had trouble getting the door open, had to jiggle the key around. He kicked off his shoes and sat at his computer and searched for information on Frans Balder, Professor.
But he was alarmingly unfocused and instead found himself wondering, as he had so many times before: where had she disappeared to? Apart from some news from her one-time employer, Dragan Armansky, he had not heard a word about her. It was as if she had vanished off the face of the earth and, although they lived in more or less the same part of town, he had never caught a glimpse of her.
Of course, the person who had turned up at Brandell’s apartment that day could have been someone else. It was possible, but not likely. Who other than Salander would come stomping in like that? It must have been Salander, and Pippi... that was typical.
The name by her doorbell on Fiskargatan was V. KULLA and he could well see why she did not use her real name. It was all too searchable and associated with one of the most high-profile trials the country had ever seen. Admittedly, it was not the first time that the woman had vanished in a puff of smoke. But ever since that day when he had knocked on her door on Lundagatan and given her hell for having written a personal investigation report about him which was much too thorough, they had never been apart for so long and it felt a little strange, didn’t it? After all, Salander was his... well, what the hell was she, in point of fact?
Hardly his friend. One sees one’s friends. Friends don’t disappear like that. Friends don’t only get in touch by hacking into your computer. Yet he still felt this bond with Salander and, above all, he worried about her. Her old guardian Holger Palmgren used to say that Lisbeth Salander would always get by. Despite her appalling childhood, or maybe because of it, she was one hell of a survivor, and there was probably a lot of truth in that. But one could never be sure, not with a woman of such a background, and with that knack for making enemies. Perhaps she really had lost it, as Armansky had hinted when he and Blomkvist met over lunch at Gondolen about six months ago. It was a spring day, a Saturday, and Armansky had offered to buy beer and snaps and all the rest of it. Even though they were ostensibly meeting as two old friends, there was no doubt that Armansky only wanted to talk about Salander and, with the help of a few drinks, indulge in a spot of sentimentality.
Among other things, Armansky told Blomkvist that his company, Milton Security, had supplied a number of personal alarms to a nursing home in Högdalen. Good equipment, he said.
But not even the best equipment in the world will help you if the electricity goes off and nobody can be bothered to fix it, and that is precisely what happened. There was a power outage at the home late one evening, and in the course of that night one of the residents, a lady called Rut Åkerman, fell and broke her femur, and she lay there for hour after hour pressing the button on her alarm to no avail. By the morning she was in a critical condition and, since the papers were just then focusing heavily on negligence in care for the elderly, the whole thing became a big deal.
Happily, the old lady pulled through. But she also happened to be the mother of a senior figure in the Swedish Democrats party. When it emerged on the party’s website, Unpixelated, that Armansky was an Arab — which incidentally he was not at all, although it was true that he was occasionally called “the Arab” in jest — there was an explosion in the posted comments. Hundreds of anonymous writers said that’s what happens “when you let coons supply your technology” and Armansky took it very badly, especially when the trolling affected his family.