“Mr Needham,” Blomkvist said.
“Ed,” Needham said. “I’m sorry to haul you over here at this ungodly hour, but it’s urgent.”
“So it would seem,” Blomkvist said drily.
“Do you have any idea what I want to talk to you about?”
Blomkvist shook his head and sat down on a sofa. There was a bottle of gin and some small bottles of Schweppes tonic on the desk next to it.
“No indeed, why would you?” Needham said. “On the other hand it’s impossible to know with guys like you. I’ve checked you out. You should know that I hate to flatter people — it leaves a bad taste in my mouth — but you’re pretty outstanding in your profession, aren’t you?”
Blomkvist gave a forced smile. “Can we just get to the point?” he said.
“Just relax. I’ll be crystal clear. I assume you know where I work.”
“Not exactly,” he said truthfully.
“In Puzzle Palace, SIG.INT. City. I work for the world’s spittoon.”
“The N.S.A.”
“Damn right. Do you have any idea how fucking insane you have to be to mess with us, Mikael Blomkvist? Do you?”
“I have a pretty good idea,” he said.
“And do you know where I think your girlfriend really belongs?”
“No.”
“She belongs behind bars. For life!”
Blomkvist gave what he hoped was a calm, composed little smile. But in fact his mind was spinning. Did Salander hack the N.S.A.? The mere thought terrified him. Not only was she in hiding, with killers on the hunt for her. Was she also going to have the entire U.S. intelligence shock troops descend on her? It sounded... well, how did it sound? It sounded totally off the wall.
One of Salander’s abiding characteristics was that she never did anything without first carefully analysing the potential consequences. She did not follow impulses or whims and therefore he could not imagine she would take such an idiotic risk if there was the slightest chance of being found out. Sometimes she put herself in danger, that was true, but there was always a balance between costs and benefits. He refused to believe that she had got herself into the N.S.A.’s systems, only to allow herself to be outwitted by the splenetic bulldog standing in front of him.
“I think you’re jumping to conclusions,” he said.
“Dream on, dude. But you heard me use the word ‘really’ just then. Some word, hey? Can be used in all sorts of ways. I don’t really drink in the mornings, and yet here I am with a glass in my hand, ha ha! What I’m trying to say is that you might be able to save your girlfriend’s skin if you promise to help me with one or two things.”
“I’m listening,” he said.
“Peachy. Let me begin by asking for a guarantee that you’ll not quote me as your source.”
Blomkvist looked at him in surprise. He had not expected that.
“Are you some kind of whistleblower?”
“God help me, no. I’m a loyal old bloodhound.”
“But you’re not acting officially on behalf of the N.S.A.”
“You could say that right now I have my own agenda. Sort of doing my own thing. Well, how about it?”
“I won’t quote you.”
“Great. I also want to make sure we agree that what I’m going to tell you now will stay between us. You might be wondering why the hell I’m telling a fantastic story to an investigative journalist, only to have him keep his trap shut.”
“Good question.”
“I have my reasons. And I trust you — don’t ask me why. I’m betting that you want to protect your girlfriend, and you think the real story is elsewhere. Maybe I’ll even help you with that, if you’re prepared to cooperate.”
“That remains to be seen,” Blomkvist said stiffly.
“Well, a few days ago we had a data breach on our intranet, our NSANet. You know about that, don’t you?”
“More or less.”
“NSANet was created after 9/11, to improve coordination between our own intelligence services on the one hand and those in other English-speaking countries — known as the Five Eyes. It’s a closed system, with its own routers, portals and bridges, and it’s completely separate from the rest of the Internet. We administer our signals intelligence from there via satellite and fibre-optic cables and that’s also where we have our big databases and store classified analyses and reports — from Moray-rated documents, the least sensitive, all the way up to Umbra Ultra Top Secret, which even the President of the United States isn’t allowed to see. The system is run out of Texas, which by the way is idiotic. But it’s still my baby. Let me tell you, Mikael, I worked my ass off to create it. Hammered away at it day and night so that no fucker could misuse it, never mind hack it. Every single little anomaly sets alarm bells ringing, plus there’s a whole staff of independent experts monitoring the system. These days you can’t do a goddamn thing on the web without leaving footprints. At least that’s the theory. Everything is logged and analysed. You shouldn’t be able to touch a single key without it triggering a notification. But...”
“Somebody did.”
“Yes, and maybe I could have made my peace with it. There are always weak spots, we can always do better. Weak spots keep us on our toes. But it wasn’t just the fact that she managed to get in. It was how she did it. She forced our server and created an advanced bridge, and got into the intranet via one of our systems administrators. That alone was a damn masterpiece. But that wasn’t all, not by a long chalk: then the bitch turned herself into a ghost user.”
“A what?”
“A ghost. She flew around in there without anyone noticing.”
“And your alarm bells didn’t go off?”
“That damn genius introduced a Trojan unlike anything else we knew, because otherwise our system would have identified it right away. The malware then kept upgrading her status. She got more and more access and soaked up highly classified passwords and codes and started to link and match records and databases, and suddenly — bingo!”
“Bingo what?”
“She found what she was looking for, and then she stopped wanting to be invisible — now she wanted to show us what she’d found, and only then did my alarm bells go off: exactly when she wanted them to.”
“And what did she find?”
“She found our hypocrisy, Mikael, our double-dealing, and that’s why I’m sitting here with you and not on my fat ass in Maryland, sending the Marines after her. She was like a thief breaking into a house just to point out that it was already full of stolen goods, and the minute we found that out she became truly dangerous — so dangerous that some of our senior people wanted to let her off.”
“But not you.”
“Not me. I wanted to tie her to a lamp post and flay her alive. But I had no choice except to give up my pursuit, and that, Mikael, seriously pissed me off. I may look calm now, but you should have seen me... Jesus!”
“You were hopping mad.”
“Damn right I was, and that’s why I’ve had you come here at this godforsaken hour. I need to get hold of Wasp before she flees the country.”
“Why would she run?”
“Because she’s gone from one crazy thing to the next, hasn’t she?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
“And what makes you think she’s your hacker in the first place?”
“That, Mikael, is what I’m going to lay on you now.”
But he got no further.
The room telephone rang and Needham picked up right away. It was reception looking for Mikael Blomkvist, and Needham handed him the receiver. He soon gathered that the journalist had been given some alarming news, so it was no surprise when the Swede muttered a confused apology and ran out of the room. But Needham would not let him get away that easily, and so he grabbed his coat and chased after him.