What he did not understand was why, at regular intervals, Salander gave up training altogether, not exercising at all, eating nothing but junk food. When she came into the gym that morning — as demonstratively dressed in black and pierced as ever — he had not seen her for two weeks.
“Hello, gorgeous. Where have you been?”
“Doing something highly illegal.”
“I can just imagine. Beating the crap out of some motorbike gang or something.”
But she did not even rise to the jest. She just marched angrily in towards the changing room and he did something he knew she would hate: he stepped in front of her and looked her straight in the face.
“Your eyes are bright red.”
“I’ve got the mother of all hangovers. Out of my way!”
“In that case I don’t want to see you in here, you know that.”
“Skip the crap. I want you to drive the shit out of me,” she spat, and ducked past him to get changed. When she emerged wearing her outsized boxing shorts and white vest with the black skull on the chest, he saw nothing for it but to go ahead and let her have it.
He pushed her until she threw up three times in his waste-paper bin. He gave her as much grief as he could. She gave him plenty of lip back. Then she went off and changed and left the gym without even a goodbye. As so often at such moments Obinze was overcome by a feeling of emptiness. Maybe he was even a little in love. He was certainly stirred — how could one not be by a girl who boxed like that?
The last he saw of her was her calves disappearing up the stairs so he could not know that the ground swayed beneath her feet as she came out onto Hornsgatan. Salander braced herself against the wall of the building and breathed heavily. Then she set off in the direction of her apartment on Fiskargatan. Once home she drank another large glass of Coca-Cola and half a litre of juice, then she crashed onto her bed and looked at the ceiling for ten, fifteen minutes, thinking about this and that, about singularities and event horizons and certain special aspects of Schrödinger’s equation, and Ed Needham.
She waited for the world to regain its usual colours before she got up and went to her computer. However reluctant she might be, she was drawn to it by a force which had not grown weaker since her childhood. But this morning she was not in the mood for any wild escapades. She hacked into Mikael Blomkvist’s computer. In the next moment she froze. They had been joking about Balder and now Blomkvist wrote that he had been murdered, shot in the head.
“Jesus,” she muttered and had a look at the online evening papers.
There was no explicit mention of Balder, but it was not difficult to work out that the “Swedish academic shot at his home in Saltsjöbaden” was indeed him. For the time being, the police were being tight-lipped and journalists had not managed to turn up a great deal, no doubt because they had not yet cottoned on to how big the story was. Other events from the night took precedence: the storm and the power outage right across the country and the scandalous delays on the railways. There was also the odd celebrity news item which Salander could not be bothered to try to understand.
The only facts reported on the murder were that it had taken place around 3.00 in the morning and that the police were seeking witnesses in the neighbourhood, for reports of anything untoward. So far there were no suspects, but apparently witnesses had spotted unknown and suspicious persons on the property. The police were looking for more information on them. At the end of the articles it said that a press conference was going to be held later that day, led by Chief Inspector Jan Bublanski. Salander gave a wistful smile. She had had a fair bit of history with Bublanski — or Officer Bubble, as he was sometimes called — and she thought that so long as they didn’t put any idiots onto his team the investigation would turn out to be reasonably effective.
Then she read Blomkvist’s message again. He needed help and without thinking twice she wrote “O.K.”, not only because it was he who was asking. It was personal. She did not do grief, at least not in the conventional way. Anger, on the other hand, yes, a cold ticking rage. And though she had a certain respect for Jan Bublanski she was not usually inclined to trust the forces of law and order.
She was used to taking matters into her own hands and she had all sorts of reasons to want to find out why Frans Balder had been murdered. Because it was no coincidence that she had sought him out and taken an interest in his situation. His enemies were most likely her enemies too.
It had begun with the old question of whether in some sense her father lived on. Alexander Zalachenko — Zala — had not only killed her mother and destroyed her childhood, he had also established and controlled a criminal network, sold drugs and arms and made a living exploiting and humiliating women. She was convinced that that sort of evil never goes away. It merely migrates into other forms. Ever since that day just over a year ago when she had woken up at dawn at Hotel Schloss Elmau in the Bavarian Alps, Salander had been pursuing her own investigation into what had become of his legacy.
For the most part his old comrades seemed to have turned into losers, depraved bandits, revolting pimps or small-time crooks. Not one of them was a villain on her father’s level, and for a long time Salander remained convinced that the organization had changed and dissolved after Zalachenko’s death. Yet she did not give up, and eventually she stumbled on something which pointed in a wholly unexpected direction. It was a reference to one of Zala’s young acolytes, a man called Sigfrid Gruber.
Already during Zala’s lifetime, Gruber was one of the more intelligent people in the network, and unlike his colleagues he had earned himself degrees in both computer science and business administration, which had apparently given him access to more exclusive circles. These days he cropped up in a couple of alleged crimes against high-tech companies: thefts of new technology, extortion, insider trading, hacker attacks.
Normally, Salander would have followed the lead no further. Not just because it seemed to have little to do with her father’s old activities. Also, nothing could worry her less than a couple of rich business groups being fleeced of some of their innovations. But then everything had changed.
In a classified report from Government Communications Headquarters in Cheltenham, England, which she had got her hands on, she had come across some codenames associated with a gang Gruber seemed now to belong to. The names had set some bells ringing, and after that she had not been able to let go of the story. She put together all the information she could find about the group and kept coming across a rumour that the organization had stolen Balder’s A.I. technology, and then sold it to the Russian — American games company, Truegames. Her source was unreliable — a half-open hacker site — but it was for this reason that she had turned up at the professor’s lecture at the Royal Institute of Technology and given him a hard time about singularities deep within black holes. Or that was part of the reason.
Part II
The labyrinths of memory
People with a photographic memory are also said to have an eidetic memory.
Research shows that people with eidetic memories are more likely to be nervous and stressed than others.
Most, though not all, people with eidetic memories are autistic. There is also a connection between photographic memory and synaesthesia — the condition where two or more senses are connected, for example when numbers are seen in colour and every series of numbers forms an image in the mind.