Blomkvist took a deep breath. “Any news on Andrei?” he said.
“We’ve traced his mobile signal to a base station in Gamla Stan, but no further. We’ve had no signal at all for a while now, as if the mobile has been smashed or just stopped working.”
Blomkvist drove even faster; fortunately the roads were empty at that hour. At first he said very little to Needham, just a brief account of what was going on, but in the end he could not hold back. He needed something else to think about.
“So what is it you think you’ve found out?”
“About Wasp? For a long time, zip. We were convinced that we’d reached the end of the line,” Needham said. “We’d left no stone unturned, and still got nowhere. In a way it made sense.”
“How so?”
“A hacker capable of a breach like that should also be able to cover all tracks. I realized pretty soon we wouldn’t get anywhere by conventional means. So I skipped all the forensic bullshit and went straight for the big question: who had the chops to pull this off? That question was our best hope. There’s hardly anyone out there with that level of ability. In that sense, you could say that the hacker’s skill worked against them. Plus, we had analysed the rootkit itself, and that...” Needham looked down at his mobile.
“Yes?”
“It had artistic qualities. Personal style, you might say. Now we just had to find its author, and so we started to send posts to the hacker community, and very soon there was one name, one handle, which came up time after time. Can you guess which one?”
“Maybe.”
“It was Wasp. Sure, there were other names, but Wasp stood out. I ended up hearing so much mythical bullshit about this person that I was dying to crack their identity, and we went right back in time. We read every word Wasp had written online, studied every operation that had Wasp’s signature on it. Soon we were certain that Wasp was a woman, and we guessed that she was Swedish. Several of the early posts were written in Swedish, which isn’t much to go on. But since there was a Swedish connection in the organization she was tracking, and Frans Balder was Swedish, it was at least a good place to start. I got in touch with the N.D.R.E., and they searched their records, and then in fact...”
“What?”
“They had a breakthrough. Many years earlier they’d investigated a hacker operation that used that very handle, Wasp. It was so long ago that Wasp wasn’t yet even particularly good at encryption.”
“What happened?”
“Wasp had been looking for data on individuals who’d defected from other countries’ intelligence services, and that was enough to trigger the N.D.R.E.’s warning system. Their investigation led them to a psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala, to a computer belonging to the head physician there, a man named Teleborian. Apparently he’d done some work for the Swedish Security Police, so he was above suspicion. Instead the N.D.R.E. concentrated on some mental-health nurses who were targeted because they were... well, to be blunt about it, immigrants. It was such a stupid, blinkered strategy. Anyway, nothing came of it.”
“I can imagine.”
“So I asked a guy at the N.D.R.E. to send over all the old material, and we sifted through it with a completely different mindset. You know, you don’t have to be big and fat and shave in the mornings to be a good hacker. I’ve met twelve- and thirteen-year-olds who are crazy good. It was obvious to me that we should look at every child in the clinic at the time. I had three of my guys investigate each one of them, inside and out, and do you know what we found? One of the children was the daughter of former spy and arch-villain Zalachenko, who was known to our colleagues at the C.I.A., and then everything got really interesting. As you probably know, there are some overlaps between the network the hacker was investigating and Zalachenko’s old crime syndicate.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean it was Wasp who hacked you.”
“Of course not. But we took a closer look at this girl, and what can I say? She has an interesting background, doesn’t she? A lot of information about her in the public record has been mysteriously deleted, but we still found more than enough and... I don’t know, I may be wrong, but I get the feeling we’re on the right track. Mikael, you don’t know shit about me. But I know what it’s like for a kid to see extreme violence at close quarters. And I know what it’s like when society doesn’t lift a finger to punish the guilty party. It hurts like hell, and I’m not at all surprised that most children who experience it go under. They turn into destructive bastards themselves.”
“Yes, unfortunately.”
“But just a few grow to be as strong as bears, Mikael, and they stand up and fight back. Wasp was one of those, wasn’t she?”
Blomkvist nodded pensively and pressed down on the accelerator a little more.
“They locked her up and kept trying to break her. But she kept coming back, and do you know what I think?”
“No.”
“She got stronger each time. She became positively lethal. She hasn’t forgotten a single thing that happened. It’s all etched into her, isn’t it? And maybe that’s at the bottom of this whole goddamn mess.”
“What is it you want?” Blomkvist said bluntly.
“I want what Wasp wants. I want to set some things right.”
“Plus get your hands on the hacker.”
“I want to meet her and give her a piece of my mind and plug every last damn hole in our security. But above all I want to get my own back on certain people who wouldn’t let me finish my job because Wasp exposed them. I have reason to believe you’re going to help me with that.”
“Why so?”
“Because you’re a fine reporter. Fine reporters don’t want dirty secrets to go on being dirty secrets.”
“And Wasp?”
“Wasp is going to get a chance to do her worst. You’re going to help me with that too.”
“Or else?”
“Or else I’ll find a way of putting her inside, and making her life hell again, I swear.”
“But for now all you want to do is talk to her?”
“No fucker is going to be allowed to hack into my system again, so I need to understand exactly how she did it. I want you to give her that message. I’m prepared to let your girlfriend go free if she’ll sit down with me and explain.”
“I’ll tell her. Let’s just hope...”
“That she’s still alive,” Needham said. They turned left at high speed in the direction of Ingaröstrand.
It was rare for Holtser to get things so wrong.
He had this romantic delusion that you could tell from a distance if a man was likely to succeed in close combat. That was why he had not been surprised when Kira’s attempted seduction of Blomkvist had failed. Orlov and Bogdanov had been completely confident. But Holtser had had his doubts even though he had only seen the journalist for one giddy second in Saltsjöbaden. Blomkvist looked like a problem. He looked like a man who could not be fooled or broken so easily.
With the younger journalist it was different. He looked like the archetypal weakling, yet nothing could have been further from the truth. Zander had resisted for longer than anyone Holtser had ever tortured. Despite excruciating pain he had refused to break. His eyes shone with a grim determination which seemed buttressed by a higher principle, and at one point Holtser thought they would have to give up, that Zander would rather endure any suffering than talk. It was not until Kira solemnly promised that both Berger and Blomkvist from Millennium would be made to suffer as well that Zander finally caved in.
By then it was 3.30 in the morning. Holtser knew that he would always remember the moment. Snow was falling on the skylights. The young man’s face was dried out and hollow-eyed. Blood had splashed up from his chest and flecked his mouth and cheeks. His lips, which for a long time had been covered with tape, were split and oozing. He was a wreck, but still you could tell that he was a beautiful young man.