It was past midnight by the time Blomkvist got home and, even though he was exhausted and had to get up at the crack of dawn, he sat down at his computer and Googled Edwin Needham. There were quite a few Edwin Needhams in the world, including a successful rugby player who had made an extraordinary comeback having had leukaemia.
There was one Edwin Needham who seemed to be an expert on water purification, and another who was good at getting himself into society photographs and looking daft. But none of them seemed right for someone who could have been involved in cracking Wasp’s identity and accusing her of criminal activity. There was an Edwin Needham who was a computer engineer with a Ph.D. from M.I.T., and that was at least the right line of business, but not even he seemed to fit. He was now a senior executive at Safeline, a leading business in computer virus protection, and that company would certainly have an interest in hackers. But the statements made by this Ed, as he was known, were all about market share and new products. Nothing he said rated higher than the usual clichéd sales talk, not even when he got the chance to talk about his leisure pursuits: bowling and fly fishing. He loved nature, he said, he loved the competitive aspect... The most threatening thing he seemed capable of doing was boring people to death.
There was a picture of him, grinning and bare-chested, holding up a large salmon, the sort of snap which are a dime a dozen in fishing circles. It was as dull as everything else, and yet gradually Blomkvist began to wonder whether the dullness might not be the whole point. He read through the material again and this time it struck him as something concocted, a facade. Slowly but surely he came to the opposite conclusion: this was the man. You could smell the intelligence services a mile off, couldn’t you? It felt like N.S.A. or C.I.A. Once again he looked at the photograph with the salmon, and this time he thought he saw something very different.
He saw a tough guy putting on an act. There was something unwavering about the way he stood and his mocking grin into the camera, at least that is what Blomkvist imagined, and again he thought of Salander. He wondered if he ought to tell her about this meeting. But there was no reason to worry her now, especially since he did not actually know anything, so instead he decided to go to bed. He needed to sleep for a few hours and have a clear head when he met Needham in the morning. As he slowly brushed his teeth and undressed and climbed into bed, he realized he was more tired than he could have imagined and fell asleep in no time. He dreamed that he was being dragged under and almost drowned in the river Needham had been standing in. Afterwards he had a vague image of himself crawling along the riverbed surrounded by flopping, thrashing salmon. But he cannot have slept for long. He woke with a start and the growing conviction that he had overlooked something. His mobile was lying on the bedside table and his thoughts turned to Zander. The young man must have been on his mind all along.
Linda had double-locked the door. There was nothing odd about that — a woman in her situation had to take all possible precautions. It still made Zander feel uncomfortable, but he put that down to the apartment, or so he tried to convince himself. It was not at all what he had been expecting. Could this really be the home of one of her girlfriends?
The bed was broad but not especially long, and both the headboard and the footboard were made of shiny steel latticework. The bedspread was black, which made him think of a bier, and he disliked the pictures on the walls — mostly framed photographs of men with weapons. There was a sterile, chilly feel to the whole place.
On the other hand he was probably just nervous and exaggerating everything, or looking for an excuse to get away. A man always wants to escape the thing he loves — hadn’t Oscar Wilde said something like that? He looked at Linda. Never before had he seen such an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and now she was coming towards him in her tight blue dress which accentuated her figure. As if she had been reading his mind she said, “Would you rather go home, Andrei?”
“I do have quite a lot on my plate.”
“I understand,” she said, kissing him. “Then you must of course go and get on with your work.”
“Maybe that would be best,” he muttered as she pressed herself against him, kissing him with such force that he had no defence.
He responded to her kiss and put his hands on her hips, and she gave him a shove. She pushed him so hard that he staggered and fell backwards onto the bed, and for a moment he was scared. But then he looked at her. She was smiling as tenderly now as before and he thought: this was nothing more than a bit of rough play. She really wanted him, didn’t she? She wanted to make love with him there and then, and he let her straddle his body, unbutton his shirt, and draw her fingernails over his stomach while her eyes shone with an intense glow and her large breasts heaved beneath her dress. Her mouth was open. A trickle of saliva ran down her chin and she whispered something he could not at first hear. “Now, Andrei,” she whispered again. “Now!”
“Now?” he repeated uncertainly, and felt her tearing off his trousers. She was more brazen than he had expected, more accomplished and wildly lascivious than anybody he had met.
“Close your eyes and lie absolutely still,” she said.
He obeyed and could hear her fiddling with something, he was not sure what. Then heard a click and felt metal around his wrists, and realized he had been handcuffed. He was about to protest, he did not really go in for that sort of thing, but it all happened so fast. With lightning speed, as if she had done it many times, she locked his hands to the headboard. Then she bound his feet with rope and pulled tight.
“Gently,” he said.
“Don’t worry,” but then she gave him a look he did not like and said something in a solemn voice. He must have misheard. “What?” he said.
“I’m going to cut you with a knife, Andrei,” she said, and fixed a broad piece of tape across his mouth.
Blomkvist was trying to tell himself not to worry. Why would anything have happened to Zander? No-one — apart from Berger and himself — knew that he was involved in protecting the whereabouts of Salander and the boy. They had been extremely careful with that piece of information, more careful than with any other part of the story. And yet... why had there been no word from him?
Zander was not someone who ignored his mobile. On the contrary, he normally picked up on the first ring whenever Blomkvist called. But now there was no way of getting hold of him, and that was strange, wasn’t it? Or maybe... again Blomkvist tried to convince himself that Zander was busy working and had lost track of time, or in the worst case had dropped his mobile. That was probably all it was. But still... after all these years Camilla had appeared out of nowhere. Something must be going on, and what was it Bublanski had said?
“We live in a world in which paranoia is a requirement.”
Blomkvist reached for the telephone on the bedside table and called Zander again. He got no answer this time either, so decided to wake their new staff member, Emil Grandén, who lived near Zander in the Röda bergen area of Vasastan. Grandén sounded less than enthusiastic but promised to go over to Zander’s right away to see if he was there. Twenty minutes later he rang back. He had been banging on Zander’s door for a while, he said, and he definitely wasn’t at home.