Blomkvist got dressed and left his apartment, hurrying through a deserted and storm-lashed Södermalm district up to the magazine offices on Götgatan. With any luck, he thought, Zander would be lying asleep on the sofa. It would not be the first time he had nodded off at work and not heard the telephone. That would be the simple explanation. But Blomkvist felt more and more uneasy. When he opened the door and turned off the alarm he shivered, as if expecting to find a scene of devastation, but after a search of the premises he found no trace of anything untoward. All the information on his encrypted email program had been carefully deleted, just as they had agreed. It all looked as it should, but there was no Zander lying on the office sofa, which was looking as shabby and empty as ever. For a short while Blomkvist sat there, lost in thought. Then he rang Grandén again.
“Emil,” he said, “I’m sorry to harass you like this in the middle of the night. But this whole story has made me paranoid.”
“I can understand that.”
“I couldn’t help hearing that you sounded a bit stressed when I was talking about Andrei. Is there anything you haven’t told me?”
“Nothing you don’t already know,” Grandén said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’ve spoken to the Data Inspection Authority too.”
“What do you mean, you too?”
“You mean you haven’t—”
“No!” Blomkvist cut him short and heard Grandén’s breathing at the other end of the line become laboured. There had been a terrible mistake.
“Out with it, Emil, and fast,” he said.
“So...”
“Yes?”
“I had a call from a Lina Robertsson at the Data Inspection Authority. She said that you’d spoken and she agreed to raise the level of security on your computer, given the circumstances. Apparently the recommendations she’d given you were wrong and she was worried the protection would be insufficient. She said she wanted to get hold of the person who’d arranged the encryption for you asap.”
“And what did you say?”
“That I knew nothing about it, except that I’d seen Andrei doing something at your computer.”
“So you said she should get in touch with Andrei.”
“I happened to be out at the time and told her that Andrei was probably still in the office. She could ring him there, I said. That was all.”
“Jesus, Emil.”
“But she sounded really—”
“I don’t care how she sounded. I just hope you told Andrei about the call.”
“Maybe not right away. I’m pretty snowed under at the moment, like all of us.”
“But you told him later.”
“Well, he left the office before I got a chance to say anything.”
“So you called him instead.”
“Absolutely, several times. But...”
“Yes?”
“He didn’t answer.”
“O.K.,” Blomkvist said, his voice ice cold.
He hung up and dialled Bublanski’s number. He had to try twice before the chief inspector came to the telephone. Blomkvist had no choice but to tell him the whole story — without discussing Salander and August’s location.
Then he called Berger.
Salander had fallen asleep, but she was still ready for action. She was still in her clothes, with her leather jacket and her boots on. She kept waking up, either because of the howling storm or because August was moaning even in his sleep. But each time she dropped off again, or at least dozed, and had short, strangely realistic dreams.
Now she was dreaming about her father beating her mother, and even then she could feel that old, fierce rage from her childhood. She felt it so keenly that it woke her up again. It was 3.45 and those scraps of paper on which she and August had written their numbers were still lying on the bedside table. Outside, snow was falling. But the storm seemed to have calmed and nothing unusual could be heard, just the wind howling and rustling through the trees.
Yet she felt uneasy, and at first she thought it was the dream lying like a fine mesh over the room. Then she shuddered. The bed next to her was empty — August was gone. She shot out of bed without making a sound, grabbed her Beretta from the bag on the floor and crept into the large room next to the terrace.
The next moment she breathed a sigh of relief. August was sitting at the table, busy with something. Without wanting to disturb him she leaned over his shoulder and saw that he was not writing new prime-number factorizations, or drawing fresh scenes of abuse. He was sketching chess squares reflected in the mirrors of a wardrobe, and above them could be made out a threatening figure with his hand outstretched. The killer was taking shape. Salander smiled, and then she withdrew.
Back in the bedroom she sat on the bed, removed her pullover and the bandage and inspected the bullet wound. It didn’t look good, and she still felt weak. She swallowed another couple of antibiotic pills and tried to rest. She might even have gone back to sleep for a few moments. She was aware of a vague sensation that she had seen both Zala and Camilla in her dream, and the next second she became aware of a presence, though she had no idea what. A bird flapped its wings outside. She could hear August’s laboured breathing in the kitchen. She was just about to get up when a scream pierced the air.
By the time Blomkvist left the office in the early morning hours to take a taxi to the Grand Hôtel, he still had no news of Zander. He tried again to persuade himself that he had been overreacting, that any moment now his colleague would be calling from some friend’s place. But the worry would not go away. He was vaguely aware that it had started snowing again, and that a woman’s shoe had been left lying on the pavement. He took out his Samsung and called Salander on the Redphone app.
Salander did not pick up, and that did not make him any calmer. He tried once more and sent a text from the Threema app: <Camilla’s after you. Leave now!> Then he caught sight of a taxi coming down from Hökens gata and noticed the driver give a start when he saw him. At that moment Blomkvist looked dangerously determined. It did not help that he failed to respond to the driver’s attempts to chat. He just sat back in the darkness, his eyes bright with worry.
Stockholm was more or less deserted. The storm had abated but there were still white-crested waves on the water. Blomkvist looked across to the Grand Hôtel on the other side and wondered if he should forget about the meeting with Mr Needham and drive straight out to Salander instead, or at least arrange for a police car to go there. No, he couldn’t do that without warning her. Another leak would be disastrous. He opened the Threema app again and tapped in:
<Shall I get help?>
No answer. Of course there was no answer. He paid the fare and climbed out of the taxi, lost in thought. By the time he was pushing through the revolving doors of the hotel it was 4.20 in the morning — he was forty minutes early. He had never been forty minutes early for anything. But he was burning inside and, before going to the reception desk to hand in his mobiles, he called Berger. He told her to try to get hold of Salander and to keep in touch with the police.
“If you hear anything, call the Grand Hôtel and ask for Mr Needham’s room.”
“And who’s he?”
“Someone who wants to meet me.”
“At this time?”
Needham was in room 654. The door opened and there stood a man reeking of sweat and rage. There was about as much resemblance to the figure in the fishing photograph as there would be between a hungover dictator and his stylized statue. Needham had a drink in his hand and looked grim, dishevelled and a little bit like a bulldog.